A Midsummer Night's Dream

Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide:
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate’s team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic; not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallow’d house:
I am sent with broom before,
To sweep the dust behind the door.

1596

Today's Word A.W.A.D.

all things

Emily Dickinson -

Fame is a bee.
It has a song --
It has a sting --
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Today's Word A.W.A.D.

Photograph of Cathedral with Bicycle

Shisa Poet:

For months, you don't move, nothing happens
and you feel like the cathedral you photographed
in Cologne, brooding by a broad river.

Low barges glide past, carrying machinery
for factories, or coal for steelworks,
but you stay put, unproductive, to gaze
in a water-mirror. It turns out
that you are really that bicycle
in the left-hand corner, stationary
on a passing barge, where you lean
against the skipper's hut, next to his washing.

Soon the barge will veer from the dark Rhein
to its pale Mosel tributary. You will be set
ashore to wheel through vineyards
in a green valley, collect grapes and look
ahead round the next bend, as you leave
people by the roadside covered in your dust.


Today's Word A.W.A.D.

Rearview Mirror

Robert Morgan

This little pool in the air is
not a spring but sink into which
trees and highway, bank and fields are
sipped away to minuteness. All
split on the present then merge in
stretched perspective, radiant in
reverse, the wide world guttering
back to one lit point, as our way
weeps away to the horizon
in this eye where the past flies ahead.



Today's Word A.W.A.D.