A little Tuesday evening dinner-time rabbit trail. (One of the boys asked how often we end up looking things up during dinner, the answer: quite often. We can’t abide by the no phones at the table rule because things must be googled and read...
Toppling Towers Tap carefully at the end of each small beam Testing, like a child who pushes on the wainscot, seeking the secret space behind a concealed panel, Thinking she is in a mysterious story. And when you find one whose looseness announces...
A challenge to homeschoolers from Erin of Bearing Blog: How do you do lunch on school days? I’m rather interested in the answer, too; so I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. If I could poll a hundred homeschooling families and get...
Two brief selections today that caught my eye. I’m mesmerized at how Walcott plays with words and images, dances between his native Caribbean and Homer’s epic world. It’s almost as if his poem is a palimpsest written on top of...
When Our Lady stood up, a queenly child, and uttered her fiat to the Angel of God, her words began to make Christ’s voice. Those first words of consent had already spoken Christ’s last words of consent; her “I commit myself to you...
Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s...
A little more from Book I of Derek Walcott’s Omeros. I just love this description of the trees that thirst to become canoes and the way they almost are ships even before they are shaped. It’s so very joyful, so full of life, and the...
“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.” Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking the minute the axe...
My nosegays are for captives My nosegays are for captives; Dim, long-expectant eyes, Fingers denied the plucking, Patient till paradise. To such, if they should whisper Of morning and the moor, They bear no other errand, And I, no other prayer...
The vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the Vocabulary of English-speaking men presents, to the mind that endeavors to grasp it as a definite whole, the aspect of one of those nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a...
