I am a sojourner in civilized life. But today I am thinking of the day we stepped onto the curved and narrow path around that pond, seeking the way where silence and song are one and the same, where simple beauty outstrips ornate, where all is love and love is all, where beams of sunlight stream through the trees in hues arrived from another world, tints which are tinctures which heal wounded souls.
Autumn leaves at Walden Pond
A man collects trash around these peaceful waters, an admirable enterprise requiring no new clothes. But he is not calm, not joyful at his labors, and he stabs at the trash with anger, not blissful, not wishful, far from finding the higher ground at the end of his path. I pray he finds the proper prayer to chant each day, the words, the song, the holy hum, the soothing thrum to overcome his desperation.
It is written that the only remedy for love is to love even more.
But who would need such a cure, I wonder, who would feel afflicted? I catch you in my gaze, hold love softly in my hand, and here by the waters of Walden I lay down and weep, softly from joy, and here we have found the fire of love, and we are warmed by its heat and guided by its light as we walk around this pond and find our way down this path which is lit a thousand times by a thousand rays of sun.
Red leaves at Walden
Simplify. The waters are calm. The sun shines off the water. Ducks swim in a row. People stroll all in a row. You find a lady’s slipper tucked into a shaded glade. We see red leaves against a blue sky. Woods surround the pond. A slight breeze. Simple. And we are simply here.
A duck -- perhaps a mallard -- at Walden
But what if the ducks swam out of sight, then flew away? What if rough winds roiled the water? What if the lady’s slippers did not fit the lady’s feet? What if the blue sky turned to black? What if all the people all in a row scattered in all directions? What if lumberjacks cut down the woods? What if that winding path suddenly slithered away like a snake? What if the pond drained and dried? What if a thousand beams of sun dimmed to darkness one by one?
Then I would front only the essential facts of life, to see if I learned what it had to teach, whether I had managed to learn these truths so I would not come to die and find that I had not lived. And I would know I had learned these truths, had learned the chant, the whispered prayer: I glory in the glow of the light of love’s bright fire and know that its flames will keep us always warm.
Maybe it’s not Bob Dylan. Maybe it’s Bob Dylan channeling Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong.
Or maybe it is Bob Dylan. Maybe he got into the eggnog and didn’t know someone had spiked it with a bit too much rum. Or maybe he knew about the rum.
Or maybe there’s just no way to describe how awfully bad — and impossible to explain — “Christmas in the Heart” really is.
Or maybe you just have to hear it to believe it. This album could change your life…you might, for example, stop believing in Santa…or you might decide that those dancing elves you saw when you drank too much spiked eggnog at that Christmas party weren’t a figment of your alcohol-drenched imagination. They were really there. They were Dylan’s backup singers on “Winter Wonderland.”
Ho-ho-hold on to your hat –
Here’s the set list:
Here Comes Santa Claus, Do You Hear What I Hear?, Winter Wonderland, Hark The Herald Angels Sing, I’ll Be Home For Christmas, Little Drummer Boy, The Christmas Blues, O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles), Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Must Be Santa, Silver Bells, The First Noel, Christmas Island, The Christmas Song, O Little Town Of Bethlehem.
The 12th annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival’s this weekend — Saturday, Oct. 17, at 8 p.m., at the historic Prallsville Mills along the Delaware River in Stockton, N.J.
Rita Dove
The main attraction, of course, will be chance to hear and meet Rita Dove, two-time U.S. poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer prize for poetry. In addition to reading from her work, Rita will sign books at two locations: Book Garden on Bridge Street in Frenchtown, N.J., at 3:30 p.m, and directly after the reading, right in the recently restored sawmill where the reading will take place, sponsored by the Borders bookstore in nearby Flemington.
But here’s a special added attraction: Laura Swanson and Keith Strunk, my ultra-talented friends and colleagues who are the principals of Frenchtown-based River Union Stage, will be staging a presentation based on a segment of Rita Dove’s latest book, “Sonata Mulattica,” which is based on the extraordinary life of George Bridgetower, a violin virtuoso to whom Beethoven initially dedicated the “Kreutzer” Sonata.
River Union Stage has partnered with me to stage the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival since 2006, and in past years has performed a shor, theatrical treatment of a selected work by the featured poet as a curtain-warmer. For Diane Wakoski’s Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons, RUS created a film treatment of the poem with appropriate visuals and music. For the 10th anniversary of the festival, featuring Robert Pinsky, RUS had a child actor, a 40-something actor and Robert himself in performance of To Television, representing Pinsky at different stages of his life, illuminated by the glow of a “television” throughout.
This year RUS, with considerable imput from Ms. Dove herself, will offer a theatrical interpretation ofThe Performer, a section from “Sonata Mulattica.” Starring will be Ryan Quinn, who performed in a previous RUS production of It’s A Wonderful Life. He received his MFA from Yale School of Drama, and has since performed in numerous regional houses and off-Broadway with many Shakespeare credits under his belt.
Ryan Quinn
It will be an extraordinary evening of poetry and theater this Saturday at Prallsville as the extraordinary Rita Dove adds her name to an impressive roster of poets who’ve come to our remote cultural outpost in western New Jersey: In addition to Pinsky and Wakoski, add the names of nationally acclaimed poets Louise Gluck, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Lux, Stephen Dobyns and Gerald Stern (of nearby Lambertville, N.J.) and other outstanding New Jersey-based poets including Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Charles H. Johnson, BJ Ward and the amazing Joe Weil.
Try to make it to Stockton, N.J., this Saturday night. And try to get there early. Since admission is free (N.B.: Donations are welcome to help offset production costs for the poetry reading series at a time when government funding for the arts has been trimmed or eliminated), seating is first-come and first-served. Lines of people were waiting to get in when Robert Pinsky read for the festival’s 10th anniversary. I expect, and hope, there will bne similarly long lines of poetry fans arriving early to get a good seat for a great night of theater and poetry.
I’ve written before about Maria Mazziotti Gillan, who’s one of my favorite poets — and favorite people. Maria, who has read several times at the annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, writes provocative, emotional, touching poems which address simple, basic issues — love, friendship, aging, illness, ethnicity — in spare, simple, powerful language that elevates, invigorates and inspires listeners and readers.
Maria runs the master’s program in creative writing at SUNY-Binghamton. She’s founding editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She’s mentored and encouraged dozens and dozens of New Jersey poets. I could go on and on, and just might, except it might be best to let you hear it for yourself.
10/29 Wesleyan University, 229 High St, Middletown, Ct. 8 pm.
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If you live anywhere near the Nutmeg State, try, try, try really hard to attend on her appearances. You will leave feeling better about life than you felt before you heard Maria’s beautiful, powerful and stirring poems.
I admire her. I like her. I know her. And I’ve never met her. She’s Ann Hutt Browning. And she’s just published a book of poetry – her first book-length collection – titled “Deep Landscape Turning.”
Here’s a brief biography:
Ann Hutt Browning has two master’s degrees, one in psychology and one in architecture, four grown children, five grandchildren, and one husband of 50 years. Born in England, raised in southern California, she attended Radcliffe College and has lived in Missouri, Kentucky, France, Macedonia, Chicago, Virginia and now Massachusetts. She and her husband, Preston, a retired English professor, operate Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts, a retreat center for writers and artists. Some of her poetry has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Southern Humanities Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Ecozoic Reader, Dogwood, Peregrine, Out of Line, Salamander, and several on-line poetry journals.
Here are two of her poems:
AN ORDINARY LIFE
When she awoke in the morning
She threw back her all cotton sheet,
Cotton woven in a far off country
By a dark skinned girl chained to her large loom.
When she went into her kitchen
She ground beans to brew her coffee,
Beans grown, roasted in a far off country
Where the tall trees were cleared off the land
For the coffee bushes to be planted
And tended by boys not in school and men
Old before their time and where all the waste
From treating the beans is flushed and dumped
In the river, adding that detritus
To the human waste and chemical run
Off already there in the gray water
And where downstream others used the water,
That dark water, for cooking and bathing.
After her children boarded the school bus,
Wearing clothing made in the Philippines,
Mauritania, Taiwan, a hodge-podge
Of imports from other worlds, far off countries,
Where sweat shops flourished,
Filled with child workers,
She went shopping:
Guatemalan cantaloupes, Mexican tomatoes,
Chilean oranges, California lettuce,
Carolina rice, Michigan peaches,
Blueberries from Maine, all bought because
In her garden she grew hybrid tea roses,
Siberian iris, cross-bred daylilies in six colors,
Held down by pine bark, chipped in Oregon.
Then she roamed the market aisle marked
“Special,” and bought a basket, its colors
Imitative of Mexican folk art, made in China,
The price suggesting child or prison labor
Dyed the fronds of grass, wove the basket
And attached the label.
She ate a quick lunch of a hamburger,
The ground beef from a far off country
Where the virgin forest was burned off
So cattle could graze on tropical grass,
The bun made from Canadian wheat
And the ketchup, again those Mexican tomatoes.
She drove home to prop up her feet
On the foam cushioned sofa, turn on the TV,
Assembled in Nicaragua,
In a maquiladora by a woman
Who rose at five a.m. to walk three kilometers
To the bus, who then rode twenty-five miles
To the factory in the tax free zone,
Who worked from eight to five
With a quarter of an hour to eat
Or use the toilet,
Who got home at eight o’clock
To bathe and feed her three children,
With eighteen cents an hour in her pocket
On good days.
The woman on the sofa
Watched two soap operas
As usual on a week day,
And ate ice cream,
American ice cream.
She liked American ice cream.
She lived an ordinary life.
___________________________________ AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
What happens now,
In the moments of our nights,
In the continuity of our days,
Shall be written in blood lines
Of darkened hearts, in the liquid
Gold plate of our broken souls,
In the long ligaments of naked limbs,
In the marrow of our fractured bones.
We stumble on with hesitant bodies;
We fall back, floundering.
How many are victims,
How many witnesses?
Can reason comprehend
The horror of explosions,
Lost lives of ordinary persons
Going about their ordinary work.
Hands touch and grip fast,
We embrace for soul’s sake.
Bond now and breathe together.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Take breath from autumn trees,
From ripe tomatoes on brown vines,
Grown old now, just as we
Are grown old
Before our time.
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I encountered Ann Hutt Browning’s poetry through her husband Preston, who has worked long and hard to gain his wife’s poetry the attention it deserves — and to publish “Deep Landscape Turning.”
I heard all about Ann — and came to feel like I know her — during a week-long stay in spring of 2009 at Wellspring House a writers and artists retreat Preston and Ann started in Ashfield, Mass., in the eastern foothills of the Berkshires, in the neighborhood of Northampton and Amherst. It’s a beautiful dream-come-true, and the spirit behind it — the vision shared by the Brownings — permeates the place. During my stay, I joined a few others in an informal readings of our works, five of us gathered around the hearth in Wellspring House’s cozy downstairs living room/library. Preston, a writer and scholar in his own right, chose not to read some of his work, but instead to read some of Ann’s poetry – and she was there in the room with us, even though she couldn’t be there, as Preston’s beautiful reading of his wife’s writing made it clear that his effort to get “Deep Landscape Turning” into print was nothing less than a true labor of love.
“Deep Landscape Turning” was just published by Ibbetson Street Press in Somerville, Mass. Here’s how to order the book. Ann’s poetry is lovely and intelligent, lyric and insightful, both personal and universal. Her book costs just $15. And how can you go wrong spending just $15 on a new book by a fine poet named Browning?
It’s like Jimmy Durante, say, tried to croon “Try a Little Tenderness.” It’s like, um, Screaming Jay Hawkins tried singing “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music.” It’s like, er, Andrea Boccelli trying to sing “Run, Run, Rudolph.” It’s like, um, Bob Dylan trying to sing “Moon River.” OK, it’s very much like Bob Dylan singing Henry Mancini’s song from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
I’m talking about the not-an-urban-legend reports that the old elf himself has, indeed, recorded an album of Christmas songs. The album, due out soon, is titled “Christmas in the Heart.” All proceeds from the album’s sales will go to the charity Feeding America.
Would I lie to you about anything having to do with Christmas? No, Virginia. In fact, here’s the actual album cover:
And here’s the track list….imagine Santa Bob singing these Yuletide tunes: Here Comes Santa Claus, Do You Hear What I Hear?, Winter Wonderland, Hark The Herald Angels Sing, I’ll Be Home For Christmas, Little Drummer Boy, The Christmas Blues, O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles), Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Must Be Santa, Silver Bells, The First Noel, Christmas Island, The Christmas Song, O Little Town Of Bethlehem.
At the top of my I-can-wait-to-hear this list: Dylan singing the “barump-bum-bum-bum” part of “Little Drummer Boy,” Dylan singing the “kids dressed up like Eskimos” part of “The Christmas Song,” and Dylan singing “the ding-a-ling/hear them ring” part of “Silver Bells.”
In fact, I think the great Dylan may have found yet another way to surprise us the way he’s surprised his fans during a nearly 50-year career filled with unexpected twists and turns. I think he should consider putting out a karaoke album — who wouldn’t want a chance to sing their very own karaoke making-believe-I’m-as-cool-as Dylan rendition of, um, “Desolation Row? How about a polka album with a Jimmy Sturrs-type take on, say, “All Along the Watchtower?” Or how about recording some children’s songs? Wait, he’s done that already. Here’s Uncle Bob singing for all of you red-diaper great-grandbabies:
Dylan singing “The First Noel?” Next thing you know, Porky Pig’s going to try to sing Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas.”
How different would our world be if Les Paul had not electrified the world with his classic electric guitar, the Gibson Les Paul? Here’s CNN’s report on the death of the patron saint of electric guitar devotees:
Les Paul, whose innovations with the electric guitar and studio technology made him one of the most important figures in recorded music, has died, according to a statement from his publicists. Paul was 94.
Les Paul, whose innovations helped give rise to modern pop music, played guitar into his 90s.
Paul died in White Plains, New York, from complications of severe pneumonia, according to the statement.
Paul was a guitar and electronics mastermind whose creations — such as multitrack recording, tape delay and the solid-body guitar that bears his name, the Gibson Les Paul — helped give rise to modern popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll. No slouch on the guitar himself, he continued playing at clubs into his 90s despite being hampered by arthritis.
“If you only have two fingers [to work with], you have to think, how will you play that chord?” he told CNN.com in a 2002 phone interview. “So you think of how to replace that chord with several notes, and it gives the illusion of sounding like a chord.”
Guitarists mourned the loss Thursday.
“Les Paul was truly a ‘one of a kind.’ We owe many of his inventions that made the rock ‘n roll sound of today to him, and he was the founding father of modern music,” B.B. King said in a statement. “This is a huge loss to the music community and the world. I am honored to have known him.”
Joe Satriani said in a statement: “Les Paul set a standard for musicianship and innovation that remains unsurpassed. He was the original guitar hero and the kindest of souls. Last October I joined him onstage at the Iridium club in [New York], and he was still shredding. He was and still is an inspiration to us all.”
Slash said, “Les Paul was a shining example of how full one’s life can be; he was so vibrant and full of positive energy.”
Lester William Polfuss was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on June 9, 1915. Even as a child he showed an aptitude for tinkering, taking apart electric appliances to see what made them tick.
“I had to build it, make it and perfect it,” Paul said in 2002. He was nicknamed the “Wizard of Waukesha.”
In the 1930s and ’40s, he played with the bandleader Fred Waring and several big band singers, including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, as well as with his own Les Paul Trio. In the early 1950s, he had a handful of huge hits with his then-wife, Mary Ford, such as “How High the Moon” and “Vaya Con Dios.”
His guitar style, heavily influenced by jazzman Django Reinhardt, featured lightning-quick runs and double-time rhythms. In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position.
Paul also credited Crosby for teaching him about timing, phrasing and preparation.
Paul never stopped tinkering with electronics, and after Crosby gave him an early audiotape recorder, Paul went to work changing it. It eventually led to multitrack recording; on Paul and Ford’s hits, he plays many of the guitar parts, and Ford harmonizes with herself. Multitrack recording is now the industry standard.
But Paul likely will be best remembered for the Gibson Les Paul, a variation on the solid-body guitar he built in the early 1940s — “The Log” — and offered to the guitar company.
“For 10 years, I was a laugh,” he told CNN in an interview. “[But I] kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here’s where it’s at. Here’s where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can’t do with a regular guitar.”
Gibson, spurred by rival Fender, finally took Paul up on his offer and introduced the model in 1952. It has since become the go-to guitar for such performers as Jimmy Page.
“The world has lost a truly innovative and exceptional human being today. I cannot imagine life without Les Paul,” said Henry Juszkiewicz, chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar, in a statement. “He would walk into a room and put a smile on anyone’s face. His musical charm was extraordinary and his techniques unmatched anywhere in the world.”
Paul is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is survived by three sons, a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Until recently he had a standing gig at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club, where he would play with a who’s who of famed musicians.
He admired the places guitarists and engineers took his inventions, but he said there was nothing to replace good, old-fashioned elbow grease and soul.
“I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one,” he said in 2002, “and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes.”
Here’s a great Wikipedia list of guitarists who played Gibson Les Pauls, ranging from Allman to Zappa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gibson_players
And here’s a video clip of Les Paul jammin’ with Chet Atkins:
OK. Say what you will. I don’t care. I like this song, “Songbird,” by the late Eva Cassidy:
OK. I’ll give you this. If I start posting songs by John Denver, say, or Barry Manilow, or — God save me — Neil Diamond, then call the attendants from Wingdale, tell them where I am, and lock me away.
But someone I care about very much likes Eva Cassidy — both her voice and the heart behind the voice. And I hear what she hears in this song, as well as in this version of Cassidy — who died in 1996, just 33 years old, of melanoma – singing “Over the Rainbow”:
Relax. It’s OK. Eva Cassidy was (and probably still is) a beautiful spirit who had a beautiful voice. Pour a glass of wine. Close your eyes. And listen to the songbird sing…
The title of this posting, “American Smooth,” is a clue and a description.
Back in 1998, I got involved with a poetry program at my local high school and had the nerve to ask one of our nation’s greatest poets — Robert Pinsky, who had just been named U.S. Poet Laureate — to take part by conducting student workshops in the afternoon and giving a public reading in the evening. Robert kindly accepted my invitation, hundreds of people showed up for his reading on that April night, and the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival was born.
Since then, thanks in large part to Robert Pinsky’s helping hand in that inaugural year, the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival has turned into one of New Jersey’s most remarkable and most unusual cultural events, bringing world-class poets — including Louise Gluck, Paul Muldoon, Gerald Stern, Diane Wakoski and many other talented poets of both national and regional accomplishment — to a relatively isolated, still somewhat rural region of western New Jersey.
That tradition of excellence will continue this fall. Here’s a press release I just sent out to poets, poetry fans and media outlets:
One of America’s most highly-acclaimed poets, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove, will read from her works at the 12th annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, which will be held Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009, at 8 p.m. in the newly renovated former sawmill at the historic Prallsville Mills along the Delaware River in Stockton, N.J.
Admission is free but donations are welcome. Seating is limited and admission will be first-come, first-served.
Dove will add her name to an impressive list of distinguished poets who have read at the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Muldoon and Louise Gluck (also a former U.S. poet laureate), National Book Award winner Gerald Stern, and award-winning poets Thomas Lux, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Stephen Dobyns and Diane Wakoski. The series has also hosted a number of outstanding poets from New Jersey and the region, including Charles H. Johnson, BJ Ward, Joe Weil and dozens of others.
Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Among her many honors are the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the 1996 National Humanities Medal.
Her books of poetry include American Smooth (W. W. Norton, 2004); On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Mother Love (1995); Selected Poems (1993); Grace Notes (1989); Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Museum (1983); and The Yellow House on the Corner (1980).
In addition to poetry, Dove has published a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays in The Poet’s World and the verse drama The Darker Face of the Earth (1994). She also edited The Best American Poetry 2000.
Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she has been teaching since 1989. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006.
Her latest poetry collection, Sonata Mulattica, was published by W.W. Norton in the spring of 2009
The Delaware Valley Poetry Festival is presented in partnership by River Union Stage of Frenchtown and the event’s founder and coordinator, Nicholas DiGiovanni of Alexandria Township, a journalist and novelist. Funding is provided by the Hunterdon County Cultural and Heritage Commission and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. The event has been held annually since 1998, debuting with a reading by then-U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who returned to help celebrate the 10th year of the reading series.
“American Smooth” — the title of one of Rita Dove’s poetry collections and a good description of her poems, both when they’re on the printed page and when they’re read aloud.
Here’s a video clip of Rita Dove reading from her latest book, Sonata Mulattica:
Enjoy the video. Buy a copy of Rita’s new book. And try to make it to Stockton, N.J., a beautiful town along the Delaware River north of Philadelphia, for a chance to see, hear and get a book signed by one of America’s finest poets, whose work combines great intelligence and depth with even greater heart and spirit.
I’m reading a poem about a firefly. It dispels the darkness with a blink, blink, blink but then with a flicker proceeds to take flight. When the firefly is about to be snatched from the air, it loses a blink, its blink’s not there, and when it feels trapped, its blink goes blank, and when its pursuer grasps and clasps, the firefly’s light shatters into shards, like stars that fall or diamond chips dulled.
I once knew girls who captured fireflies in jars. The jars were filled with clover and grass. When enough fireflies were caught, the girls would remove the bugs’ glowing tails and stick the tails on their thin fingers, and they would call them love rings, the glow of love wrapped around their fingers, glowing in the dark summer night , the light cutting through the warm heavy air, and I would tell the girls to let the fireflies free, let them loose from their prison jars, to think about how much it must hurt to be snatched from the air, to have their glow so roughly taken, to fly through the night with no light to guide them, and all for the sake of the glow of love, for rings of love, just for that, just for that these lightning bugs would no longer flash their bursts of light as the summer thunder rolled like kettle drum rolls as the fireflies flickered and flared over the lawns of summers in the firefly nights when I was a boy and little girls trapped fireflies in rehearsal for dark heartbreaks to come.
Years later, on a summer night when I first moved to the country, I parked my car by the side of the road, near a field of baled hay, and watched on a moonless night as thousands of fireflies danced their firefly dance in the still July air, lighting up the hay-scented field with a glow that filled my heart with joy and my spirit with love and my eyes with tears to bear witness to such beauty.
And amid the lights one light shone brightest. Could it be the firefly queen? The original light? All light came from her light and all light returned to it. Her light was the light of shards unshattered, stars ever shining, diamonds undulled.
If ever I see that firefly’s blink again I will not snatch it from the air, I will not make it lose its blinking beauty. I will not grasp and clasp. I will bask in the glow of its cool soft light. I will remember that love’s illumination shines brightest when its flight is unfettered and free.
