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

From "The Rabbi's Cat" by Joann Sfar

"You know what?  We should live like hermits in a cave...

"No, Allah wouldn't be pleased.  We'd be like Jonah, preferring things to people"

"So?  Can't we say we've served others, they wear us out, we're old and want peace?"

"No."

"When you see new things, look and don't speak right away.

....you could look in silence"

"neither speak nor express an opinion?  I've never done that."

The painter is happy...he paints countless landscapes.  

"This is the desert.  What can you paint here?"

"The colour."

"Blue for the sky, blue for the dunes, that's dull."

"I can use other colors too.  And I can swap the dunes' calm lines for something else."

"Why come here to reinvent everything? You could have done exactly the same in Russia."

"No. Not exactly."

"I prefer looking at nature than your daubs."

"Me too.  That's why I observe closely before I begin."

Asterix

Even better than Google

Avoid Mixing Homonyms in Expressions, and All About "Eggcorns"

Mixing homonyms is similar to the effect of "misheard lyrics" 

(also called Mondegreens) 

Eggcorns is a newer term 

described in this article  

meaning misheard words that still retain their original meaning  

(the word eggcorn is still recognizable as acorn, as long as it has a context)

Like:

 it's a doggy-dog world (instead of dog-eat-dog world)

I like "all-timers" instead of Alzheimers  

"Southern Peru gives us one of their best cymbals"
image from your mum, eating out in Peru.  

The translator has switched cymbals for symbols.
I might excuse the error since translating menus is no easy task, and this was overseas,
but I see examples like these
constantly
out there in the internet wilderness:

"the utensil serves a duel purpose"
(it should be dual, meaning 2 purposes)

 I need to tell you the backs story
(should be back story, as in background)

Our industries pray on
(prey on, as in bird of prey)

police found cashes of stolen items
(cache/caches meaning hidden in a secret place, from the French)

don't waist your time
should be: don't waste your time)
(This expression has 2.4 MILLION hits on Google.
See what I mean by internet wilderness?  really?  2.4 million?
Google is pretty smart and asks if I mean don't waste your time.

for all intensive purposes
(all intents and purposes) (that's an eggcorn)

these cookies are home maid
(home made)
Unless, of course, your employee prepared these cookies.

I saw this in an otherwise well-edited enjoyable book :
along with his cadre of confidents
(should be cadre of confidantes--people in whom he confides or trusts) from the French.

There is no excuse for this now that we have devices in our hands with processors more powerful than the ones that put man on the moon.

you need to click over to this article "Word Up" from the Washington Post at least to see the clever cartoon.

Examples of Anguished English

Reviewing the menu:

"I'd like the "banana in a blazes with ice cream" please.

No, wait,
make that a pancake with rum, in a blaze if you don't mind."

image: by your mum
an actual menu from a nice restaurant in Peru

Imagery from the Book "Cannery Row"

"Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row.  In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light...cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground"

"around them the evening crept in as delicately as music"

"little water snakes slipped down to the rocks and then gently entered the water and swam along through the pool, their heads held up like little periscopes and a tiny wake spreading behind them."

From Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
photo courtesy of John Wise

Mental Pyrotechnics

This is Boris Johnson whose wacky plans for fireworks on the Big Ben clock in London failed, leaving Brits confused New Years Eve 2013.


"Somewhere in a remote recess of his brain mental pyrotechnics were at play;
a sort of intellectual pin-wheel sprouted senseless ideas and suggestions of senseless ideas."
from The Chase of the Golden Plate by Jacques Futrelle (1906)

Tidbits from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

"I woke beside a creek in a bed of kudzu vines.  A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones. darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air."

"farmhouses with wide porches and tractor-tire swings suspended from ropes on nearby tree branches; windmills sprouted up beside them, their giant silver petals creaking a little when the breezes rose."

"There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed....
...........I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one."

"I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T.Ray.  He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse.  It seemed like this should tell God something."

"The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time out, the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life."

"orange and pink swirls still hung in the sky from sunset"  image from southern living.com

"darkness had settled in and the fireflies sparkled around our shoulders"

"cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus"

"What happened when two people felt [pain] would it divide the hurt in two?  make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?"

Rosalita the Riveter

from Time Life Pictures Getty images as posted in NY Times May 21, 2006

They were welcome during WWII ..cast as heroic braceros..but in the 1950s Mexicans were rebranded as dangerous, welfare-seeking wetacks"

They Treat Us So Bad

Once, when visiting Teotihuacan near Mexico City, my friend and I stopped to chat with a vendor.  My Anglo friend told me (in English, and in front of the vendor) that I shouldn't buy because it was probably a fake.  I had no answer when the vendor responded "they treat us so bad, even in our own country."

"nearly every immigrant group has been caught at that crossroads for a time, wanted for work but unwelcome as citizens...but Mexicans have been summoned and sent back in cycles for 4 generations"

Picking cotton in Texas in 1919, image from New York Times

image from latimes.com


"They say that 'free trade' is supposed to help us.
We get manufacturing jobs like my son-in-law's at the General Motors plant in Silao.
That's fine with the American companies.
It's expensive for them to pay car workers in the States.

But when it comes to agriculture, this free trade is killing us...
the Americans refused to stop selling their cheap corn in Mexico...
more and more people will try to cross the border now,
to find work.
This, while the Americans are trying harder than ever to turn us back.

From Crossing the Wire by Will Hobbs

Tidbits from "Orphan Train"

"the nubby white bedspread like braille under my fingers"

"You are as handy as a pocket in a shirt!"


about Lutheranism:
"I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best
and we should all just be kind to each other."

"...their wails penetrate my skin like tiny needles..."

"Dandelions dance like sparklers in the grass."

"he had yet to eat a chili that was too hot for him.
His taste buds were as anesthetized as an
Indian bureaucrat's conscience"

"He looked frail,
the bags under his eyes sagging
like deflated balloons hanging from a light fitting the morning after a party"

I Can't Tell What You're Thinking

"I have a very limited intelligence--
I only understand what people TELL me.
from The Duchess of Duke Street


......................................

depression is a symptom exhibited by

smart people thinking about their complicated lives

...

the result of a life examined.

Sometimes I make the mistake of

comparing myself to people who have things:

cars, houses...

but 

I have invested all my time and energy

in people,

and learning,

and experiences with my family.

And then I remember that those other people

have lives that consist

ONLY

of what I do not have