Blue Marble: Next Generation

This quartet of photos on CNet shows the planet during each of four seasons, totally cloud free. Seasonal changes in snowfall, differences between hemispheres, and other seasonal changes, are all visible.

Pretty neat.

Autumnal Equinox Hymn

Hail, great day of Light and Dark divided,
When perfect balance rules their age-old strife!
Though darkness grows, let our steps be guided
Through all the flickering shadows, to life
Unfettered by hopelessness or despair.
We turn our backs to the simmering coals,
And search the night with new-accustomed eyes.
At first our search yields nothing, since the glare
From the fire draws us in — hearts and souls
Rebel at thoughts of finding truth out there,

Out in deep darkness where mysteries dwell,
Where strangeness is oft equated with fear;
We mistake angels for demons from Hel,
And heat and light claim us, and keep us near.
Yet turn to the lessons that cold can teach;
Hasten and listen to the shadows’ story;
Sit and study in the school of the dark.
There’s wisdom to be found in barn owl’s screech;
Ant and blind mole dig their roads to glory;
Wolf’s howl leaves behind a shivering mark —

Even crisp autumn days share their lessons
To bend and let go, to dig in and dream.
Make preparation, for time still hastens,
And the chill breath drawn in puffs out as steam.
The mountains are chanting hymns of fire,
And crow croaks out his twilight orisons.
Take heed of their rites from your sunset seat,
And turn your eyes from the dying pyre
To embrace Autumn and her benisons:
Her shadows in our eyes, her drafts on our feet.

Autumnal Greeting

Technical difficulties currently prevent me from posting the Autumnal Equinox Hymn — I left the notebook at the Synagogue the other night, and so it’s somewhat unpolished. I don’t like it yet. That will come soon. In the meantime, I finished another in the Great Year cycle.

Here is the Autumnal Greeting:

Hail to thee, Autumn, when the tide runs strong,
and daylight and darkness hold equal sway.
For now, green leaves remain where they belong,
but coming tempests shall blow them away.
Then every bare gray trunk shall sweep the sky;
then every wren shall seek a southern nest.
Swans return on their mighty migration.
In the field, mullein and yarrow will die.
Thunder and rain will roll out of the west,
and steaming hot breath shall be our portion

when white oak leaves become brittle, and fall;
when chicory and snakeroot dry to dust;
when deep lakes echo with the goose’s call;
when hillsides trade green for yellow and rust.
Goldenrod and campion dot meadows.
Though cardinal sings to her mate in the birch,
she sings of coming journeys and farewells —
for staying means facing winter’s sorrows:
snowed in, starving, on an unsheltered perch,
above icy brooks in narrow, dark dells.

Unrelenting, Night advances unchecked —
seizes minutes from Day, each dawn and dusk,
commands that Summer’s defenses be wrecked.
The scythe cuts down the corn and leaves the husk.
Fox prints, and turkey tracks, meet by the pond
where bullfrog sounds the order to retreat.
Lean days lie ahead for mouse, deer and hare,
ever united in a sacred bond
with the dying meadow and dreaming wheat,
the wilting fleabane, and the sleeping bear.

September Full Moon Sonnet

Hail, lady Moon, when autumn creeps in, wet,
and drip-drop-dripping on ferns turned yellow.
Red squirrel runs errands, starting to fret
that nights are colder, and days more mellow:
he plants the oaks of the next century,
and prays to you that his younglings survive.
Ants march homeward as ordered infantry:
their hidden halls must keep their kind alive
when streambeds long dry refill with water,
when leaves beging tumbling from the beech.
Harvest hugs the world: all life needs fodder
as summertime slowly slips out of reach.
Crickets transpose and mute their constant song,
knowing frost must overtake them, ere long.

Thanks to for the transposition idea from his Gossamer Commons piece in the webcomics telethon. It set the right tone for what I’m hearing these days, and feeling…

September New Moon Sonnet

Hail, bright crescent, rising on first cool night,
rising while carrots thicken in black earth,
and pumpkins gradually expand their girth,
spreading vines across a garden of blight.
These herbs have given savor and delight
through long summer days. Even here, there’s birth:
tarragon and basil seeds find a hearth
to hide from first frost, and deep winter night,
where through winter they’ll linger, safe and sound.
Turning leaves make shows of flame everywhere,
though greenness still governs both beech and oak.
Orchards fill with apples — red, full and round;
Rabbits, squirrels and turkeys claim their share,
in spite of warnings that gun and hawk spoke.

“Diet” update…

I’ve been doing this diet from the doctor down in White Plains for a while now, and while I’ve not been great about following it, I have noticed some changes. Yesterday I put on a shirt that hasn’t ever really fit me properly. It’s labeled “large”, which means it should be tight on me, and not really comfortable. All that changed yesterday, when I put it on and it was snug where it should have been, and loose where it shouldn’t. I look better and I feel better, too. And these regular outbreaks of pimples on my flesh are slowing down and appearing much less frequently.

The doc said these skin outbreaks were the result of my skin doing its secondary function of flushing waste out of my body. The fact that there are a lot fewer pimples means that there’s a lot less waste inside, and it’s likely less toxic as a result. So far, so good.

Summer Greeting [belated]

Summer Greeting

Hail to you, bright summer, gathered in green,
all thickly swaddled in rustling leaf:
squirrel and chipmunk are grown sleek and lean;
raptor glides on updrafts of pure belief.
Ferns overhang every brook and each pool,
and bramble claims another patch of turf.
Frog conceals himself in grasses grown tall
in sun-showered field. Under oaks, it’s cool,
and Ocean sends a warning in the surf
that life is both precious and very small.

There are deer, lying dead, beside the road,
but a black mole escapes the owl’s beak.
Fox and coyote overlook a toad.
Nothing in nature is naïve or weak:
all beings cleave to ancient strategies,
and tend to their tribes through famine and feast.
White maggots choose turkey as sacred food;
gnawed antlers carry hidden histories
of fieldmouse and shrew, and those noticed leas,
who carry much of Mother Nature’s load.

Summer is wrought with tiny artistries:
the roots of a fern; a snake’s meander;
the blood in a humming-bird’s arteries;
the crimson-black wings on a tanager;
Tall grasses bent heavy with ticks and dew;
moss and lichen paired with partridgeberry.
What rotting oak sheds, earthworm will renew,
and honeybees now build in the hollows,
where woodpecker once danced and made merry.

This poem, or rather this series of poems just posted, brings to twenty-two pages the cycle of Great Year poems — the sonnets for the moon, the seasonal greetings, the great sabbats and esbats, and a few festival days. I should think about publishing. At the same time, it’s hard to contemplate that, because there are a great many pieces in this cycle that I consider necessary that I haven’t written yet. I suppose, once the Moon/Esbat/Sabbat cycle is finished, that I could publish that — and then later bring out a collection of the festival day poems. Something to consider.

How many readers would buy such a book?

Edit: I just said to one of my colleagues at boy scout camp, that given how I started the summer (in my Mother’s words) “barely knowing an oak from an oriole” I’ve made great progress. Maybe forty plants, thirty birds, six snake types, eight frogs and toads, moles and shrews and fieldmice and chipmunks. Progress indeed.

Lughnasadh Hymn

Hymn for Lughnasadh

Decline a bit more, O Sun Unconquered:
In your fading is our harvest secured.
Your course runs swift and your tread’s less measured
over ripe fields where the first fruit’s matured.
The farmers market stalls are filled with corn;
there are bushel bins of fresh tomatoes,
baskets of of cucumbers and yellow squash.
Chilies, basil and dill lie freshly shorn
beside mountains of russet potatoes.
Harvest begins with such colorful splash.

Soon enough we’ll add orange to the plate,
when pumpkin and yam make their appearing.
Yet strawberries and blueberries abate;
the hour for hot cider is nearing.
Summer’s last blossoms wilt in the dog days;
snakes tango in a bed beneath boulder,
and honey bees guard their queen more closely.
Dawn wraps herself in thunderstorm’s cold grays:
another year wiser — though not older –
she takes to late summer uneasily…

but more time in bed seems almost painless.
She lets her boss sleep in some more each day.
Green grasshopper seems confused and helpless,
now that his camouflage has dried away.
Sparrow and robin both mark out his end,
as heron marks minnow, and hawk marks wren:
each species plans another’s overthrow
and conspires too how best to defend
against foes, and chance, and the hands of men,
to last through leaf-turn, and onset of snow.

(Belated) Summer Solstice Hymn

For a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with busyness in other parts of my life, but also involving temporary loss of the notebook involved, I haven’t been able to type this up, much less post it. My apologies for anyone counting on it.

Summer Solstice Hymn

Hail to thee, Sun Unconquered, at your height:
we have watched you climb through lengthening days,
suffusing once-dim hours with warm light,
and bathing the world with life-giving rays.
With this triumph done, your downfall begins,
and though sweet greening clings to the soil
the flowers fade, and the wheel slowly turns.
There’s still time for purple blueberry grins,
and killing aphids — the gardener’s toil.
Wetlands stay canopied by woodland ferns.

Yet some maple leaves transform to yellow,
even as tart new blackberries take shape.
Snakes sun themselves on rocks; bullfrogs bellow.
Owl wings silent while these woods yet sleep,
hunting phoebe nestled among brambles.
Red-winged blackbird displays his sergeant’s stripes;
new bluets and buttercups carpet fields.
Young bucks walkabout on midnight rambles,
possessed at once by two great archetypes:
both lord of the forest and prey who yields.

Now red-tailed hawk teaches her young to fly;
from garden’s black earth springs basil and chive.
Oriole’s nest conceals a hungry cry:
All existence proclaims: We are alive!
Thus summer’s feast begins beneath your eye:
as lichen and mosses split open stone,
Indian pipe breaks down what died last year;
cattails make space for duck and dragonfly.
Oak takes pride in the half-inch he has grown:
though he rots, he’s still old and without peer.

June Full Moon Sonnet

June Full Moon Sonnet

Sing, lady Moon, of sweat-sweltering days,
and chill nights that settle dew on each leaf.
Your fair light must cool us when the sun’s blaze
reddens our flesh and burns our skin to grief.
Sing of bats chittering as twilight nears,
clumsy bumble-bee gathering pollen,
and gardens where the first basil appears.
It seems every last flower has fallen;
only the tyranny of greenness shows.
Yet black thunderheads crowd the haze-softened hills.
Thorns remain, though white petals flee the rose.
Trout leaps up from river with heaving gills,
and turkey struts beside his favorite field,
both determined to strive and not to yield.

That’s half the Lunar Year Cycle finished. Of course, I’m also supposed to produce a Summer Greeting and a Solstice Hymn for today. Yikes! When did it get to be the Solstice already?

Argonautica: Jason at Colchis is finished and at a printer’s in Middletown. I called the place in Worcester I usually go, and asked if they could do it today; they could not. So, I took it to my old place in central CT, assuming that if they couldn’t get it done today, they could get it done by tomorrow around 4:30. I could then pick it up, sell a few copies to Klekolo to sell to the patrons who remember me, and then pick up for our drive down to my parents before going to SpiritFire on Wednesday morning after my doctor’s appointment. Sigh. Just thinking about all that makes me tired.

I’m still not packed for SpiritFire. The laundry isn’t done or folded; I’ve been occupied with getting the play written.

I also got five copies made, so I also have back-up emergency copies in the event of a power outage or an equipment failure at the printer’s, and we can perform the play no problem. I need to sell 33 copies at $10 each to break even on this project, and I haven’t even done a thorough-going edit on the text, first. It’s pretty good as is, and it’s published by a new entity — Bearable Wizardry, using the icon/image that designed for me, as its colophon. I love iWork and Pages, already. Though Pages is not set up to produce booklets on 8.5″x11″ paper very well, at least not if you want page numbers. If page numbers don’t matter, then it’s easy.

D’oh!

Time to get cracking.