A good poem

I love getting up to a poem every morning. Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac is a wonderful program - a new poem every day, and a little titbit of information too. Which author's birthday is it, why are we celebrating this holiday?

Garrison Keillor has impeccable taste and it's the main reason why I'm assigning his book Good Poems to my students next year. When I have the time, I'll have to check out some of his audio cds. He's quite the humorist, I hear.

Back to the poem. Today's selection is so perfect for me that I had to put it on the blog. Here it is:

The Mind is a Hawk

The mind is like a hawk, trying to survive
on hardscrabble. Hunting, you wheel
sometimes for hours on thermals

rising from sand so dry
no trees
grow native. Some days, you circle
only bones and snakeskin, the same old

cactus and mesquite. The secret
is not to give up on shadows, but glide
until nothing expects it, staring

to make a desert give up dead-still
ideas like rabbits with round eyes
and rapidly beating hearts.

~ by Walter McDonald from Night Landing

And whose birthday is it today? It's the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke's. Born in Prague, 1875. Here is a quotation that Keillor featured:

"It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

And now, it's back to writing my story. Maybe groceries later. I've run out of garlic, rocket salad, and scotch-tape; I need to pick up some vitamin E cream for my mom; and I want to enjoy the Christmas decor and music in the mall! Since I can't afford to spend the day roaming Briarwood, I'll have to settle for Kroger's or Target. The only Christmas ornaments I have here? A stuffed snowman my mom got me, a penguin with a muff (now dangling from my halogen lamp), and a tiny hot pink bear with headband and striped scarf resting in a sleigh. No tree, no Christmas album (unless I play the soundtrack of Love Actually, which has some holiday tunes), no Christmas treats (this one I can fix, once I get to grocery shopping).

Happy weekend to all. It's going to be late nights and my heart rate going up, up, up as I churn out too slowly my story and then start to wonder why I never seem to stop procrastinating.

Oh, something extra - a dream from last night. A girl I knew in school in Singapore appeared. She wasn't someone I liked a whole lot, and in the dream, she was actually quite nice, so that was fine. Another girl from seconday school was with us too. This one I like less than the first one (note the present tense; I don't usually dislike people, but this girl is an exception). And she didn't say a word to me, and that was fine too. Third girl from secondary school (I wonder why I'm dreaming up all these girls from the past) was someone I was quite terrified of. She was a bit of a bully, very domineering, very intrusive. She was still the same in the dream, but I actually fought back. I didn't hit her (though I felt rather inclined to), but I said a few things to her, and they were good, though I can't remember the lines now. I remember feeling victorious though. Let's hope I feel victorious this weekend too. I need to finish that darn story.

Posted by Monoceros at December 4, 2004 10:20 AM