Emily Dickinson - when needs must

254

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

Necessary noise ... part 2

More Gaiman ... literary genius

A field mouse found a fallen hazelnut and began to bite into the hard shell of the nut with its sharp, ever-growing front teeth, not because it was hungry, but because it was a prince under an enchantment who could not regain his outer form until he chewed the Nut of Wisdom. But its excitement made it careless, and only the shadow that blotted out the moonlight warned it of the descent of a huge grey owl, who caught the mouse in its sharp talons and rose again into the night.

The mouse dropped the nut, which fell into the brook and was carried away, to be swallowed by a salmon. The owl swallowed the mouse in just a couple of gulps, leaving just its tail trailing from her mouth, like a length of bootlace. Something snuffled and grunted as it pushed through the thicket – a badger, thought the owl (herself under a curse, and only able to resume her rightful shape if she consumed a mouse who had eaten the Nut of Wisdom), or perhaps a badger.

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I am that field mouse.

Neil Gaiman

I’m not quite sure how I got to be fifty-one years old without even knowing about Neil Gaiman (never mind reading him). He wrote the following extract in Stardust:

The moon was setting.

Dunstan raised his hand to his mouth and hooted. There was no response; the sky above was a deep colour – blue perhaps, or purple, not black – sprinkled with more stars than the mind could hold.

He hooted once more.

“That,” she said severely in his ear, “is nothing like a little owl. A snowy owl, it could be, a barn owl even. If my ears were stopped up with twigs perhaps I’d imagine it an eagle owl. But it’s not a little owl.’

Dunstan shrugged, and grinned, a little foolishly. The faerie woman sat down beside him. She intoxicated him: he was breathing her, sensing her through the pores of his skin. She leaned close to him.

“Do you think you are under a spell, pretty Dunstan?’

“I do not know.’

She laughed, and the sound was a clear rill bubbling over rocks and stones.

“You are under no spell, pretty boy, pretty boy.” She lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky. “Your stars, she asked. “What are they like?” Dunstan lay beside her in the cool grass, and stared up at the night sky. There was certainly something odd about the stars: perhaps there was more colour in them, for they glittered like tiny gems; perhaps there was something about the number of tiny stars, the constellations; something was strange and wonderful about the stars. But then …

They lay back to back, staring up at the sky.

“What do you want from life?” asked the faerie lass.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “You, I think.”

“I want my freedom,” she said.

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Listen to the faerie lass, Douglas

Thank fuck for T S Eliot

From Four Quartets

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

From Preludes

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

and from one of mine ...

"I think the technical term is fucked!" (alright, not poetic. It's from my great, unpublished novel)

if ever a word applied ... verbosse

verbosse - A long-winded employer who never stops talking.

e.g., The staff meeting ran an hour longer than usual. The verbosse department head decided to read to us every single word in our Corporate Ethics Policy manual.

From pseudodictionary.com

Necessary noise ... part 1