Poem "A Mountain View"

Sunset

  Sierra Nevada

  snow on the soft blue range,

Sky, keep your glittering

  moon for awhile,

  Don’t let the mountains change

 

Rose Burgunder

image from photography nationalgeographic.com

Poem "Clouds"

image from wikipedia
Can't find this poem anywhere on the internet, so here it is

Like anxious old ladies

late to Sunday meetin’

the clouds scurry across the

stair-steps of the sky

with their vapour-skirts trailing

behind.

Latayne Colvett

Exerpts from "If You're Not From the Prairie" by David Bouchard Canadian Poet

If you're not from the prairie, you don't know the sun, you can't know the sun.
Diamonds that bounce off crisp winter snow
Warm waters in dugouts and lakes that we know
The sun is our friend from when we were young
A child of the prairie is part of the sun
If you're not from the prairie you don't know the sun.
.......................

If you're not from the prairie you don't know what's flat, you've never seen flat
When travellers pass through across our great plain
They all view our home they all say the same
"It's simple and flat!" They've not learned to see
The particular beauty that's now part of me
If you're not from the prairie you don't know what's flat.
.......................

So you're not from the prairie and yet you know snow you think you know snow?
Blizzards bring danger as legends have told
In deep drifts we roughhouse, ignoring the cold
At times we look out at great seas of white
So bright is the sun that we squeeze our eyes tight
If you're not from the prairie you don't know snow.
........................

If you're not from the prairie you can't know my soul
You don't know our blizzards, you've not fought our cold
You can't know my mind, nor even my heart
Unless deep within you, there's somehow a part
A part of these things that I've said that I know
The wind, sky and earth, the storms and the snow
Best say you have - and then we'll be one
For we will have shared that same blazing sun.

David Bouchard

Description of New York from Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

image from Wikipedia

"New York City is the most fatally fascinating city in America.  She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country...constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther."
....
"The last efforts of the sun were being put forth in turning the waters of the bay to glistening gold; the green islands on either side, inside of their war-like mountings, looked calm and peaceful."

From The Autobiograhy of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

"The crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gaiety...to some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to the one addicted to the habit.
It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it.  Rather than be deprived of it, they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain and misery; they would not exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among a great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it."

From The Autobiography of am Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

image from wikipedia

Two Poems About Being Gentle with Animals

From "Snake" by D.H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
.....
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
.....

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
......

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

.... 
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Little Things is the poem I would tell my children when we saw an animal killed by cars

or in the city.

Little Things

Little Things, that run and quail,
And die, in silence and despair!
Little things, that fight and fail,
And fall, on sea and earth and air!
All trapped and frightened little things,
The mouse, the coney, hear our prayer!
As we forgive those done to us,
- the lamb, the linnet and the hare -
forgive us all our trespasses,
little creatures, everywhere!

by James Stevens, 1926

From Yale Review of "Exploited-Migrant Labour in the New Economy"

"Governments of the wealthiest nations have created multiple dilemmas for their countries, their workers, the migrants and democracy itself.
.....
Citizens in wealthy nations are divided between those who want to close the gates on immigration and those who welcome the newcomers
....
the ambitions poor in this unequal world are willing to risk their lives to improve their lot.  Haphazard enforcement...[does] little to dissuade job-seekers...anticipating tedious, revolting and even dangerous work.
...such immigrants hope that their sacrifice is temporary...jobs mean survival in the modern world....  Ordinary citizens can only witness the rising inequality an degrading values that accompany a 2-tier class society.  Governments easily claim that the newcomers from other countries have no rights so the immigrants become a convenient foe...

Employers large and small take advantage of undocumented workers willing to work for low wages and yet the wealthy respond as though their communities were under attack by those who flee poverty in their homelands.  That attitude suggests that the workers don't mind the exploitation."

Excerpts from Yale Global Book Review by Susan Froetschel
"Exploited--Migrant Labour in the New Economy by Toby Shelley

Meaning of "To Make a Dog's Dinner" of Something

Means to make a real mess of something.

Mostly British, but now we have so much BBC programming we start to see these expressions