A note from our 7-year-old neighbor (or civility flourishes in our youth)

Easter 2010

Local violinist sheds his identity on 4/1/10

Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2010 11:25 PM
Subject: New Life

Hi friends, I have embarked on a new life. I have seen the light, and am taking a new identity. Please refer to me now on as Rama Lama.

I have rid myself and my being of all material goods, which is quite freeing.

I have let my identity as a spiritual being replace the one that you all have come to know as the musician, and am releasing the musical life that I have been publicly pursuing. Please know that although I love music, I will not be considering myself a musician any longer.

Namaste, Rama Lama

April

I am watching a film
About Norway, maybe Denmark-
where winter is one unbroken
night, six months long
a country with vast rural stretches
inside the Arctic Circle,
where the cities are ancient,
and the diet-fish and wine-superhuman.
It is April there, and this
is no glossy travel come-on
because bulky middle-aged women
in aprons and house slippers
are lolling on park benches
lifting wrinkled faces to the sun.
Other women with big strong arms
and a few teeth missing
scrub carpets in the river
and men in suits run, growling
with joy, into the park tearing
off neckties and throwing
themselves onto the grass.
Mothers by the duck pond
are holding each other
and weeping while children
wrench off shoes and socks.
They are all insane with spring
And I recognize them immediately.


Meredith Holmes/March 2003

New from Southeast Main

clipped from southeastmain.wordpress.com

Flamingo

By Jer

---

Windows is Shutting Down

Windows is Shutting Down

by Clive James

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.















Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must be meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

"Windows Is Shutting Down"
by Clive James from Opal Sunset: Selected poems, 1958–2008. ©
W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.

From Writer's Almanac

Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length

For Sharon on her birthday which she shares with Robert Frost.

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length

by Robert Frost

Oh, stormy stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun's brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day's perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

"Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length" by Robert Frost, Collected Poems. © Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1969.