FLIGHT PLAN |
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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
Talent without perseverance is a long way from anywhere.
The regular daily Flight Plan will be
suspended for a few weeks while I'm away helping Webmaster Ken Blackie work out the design
and content of our upcoming STANYAN HOUSE web site. I hope you'll continue landing here
ever day though because Jay Hagan and Melinda Smith have chosen two poems from a different
one of my books for every day that I'm gone.
So, something new will be here every morning. The Thought for Today and the Notable
Birthdays will continue. See you soon.
Love, Rod
Two poems from "Valentines."
For His Pleasure
Morning is the greatest architect,
the builder of the grass and the clouds,
the maker of the anthems
made for love and death,
the one whose testimony
will be passed from pasture up to hill,
and further up to hill above
by all things living,
moving through its eyes.
The terrible detonations of the rain,
the bickering of the thunder
from the sea,
the confidences betrayed by breeze
and finally wind
cannot, together or alone,
affect the master draftsman, Morning.
The soul is blackened by the night.
Caught in its pitch with no road out,
the heart, the mind will stutter
and grow cold,
a little older and apart.
But nearly everything that's killed by dark
can be resurrected by the dawn,
that sweet designer of the river's thaw -
the ocean's rise and fall.
Morning is the greatest dreamer
of them all.
He is the first apostle of the living God,
the only one allowed to talk to trees
and hear the answers.
In the morning's diamond chambers
the daffodil is not forgotten.
The new plowed field is damp, delicious,
and stretches, lifts toward eternity.
The sun now rising
comes to bake the ladybug's enamel
and with its wand ignites the grass, the leaf,
the aspirations of the dormant hedge.
Only in the A.M. hour
do these fires start the root to rise.
Between the two immensities
of dusk and dawn
lie only waiting hours,
time to waste or roundabout.
And man, the littlest of all things
the first hour touches or makes up,
can only sigh as sunlight reaches him -
each sigh a little loss of life,
each bit of sunlight something
that regenerates the loss.
Morning, with its catalogue of hope,
has never seen the face of doubt,
not crippled poverty or crushing wealth,
only that creation and procreation
of itself.
Some naked piece of something
called Authority
will always try to take our Mornings
from us;
but we, its children, will resist, fight back,
until the Resurrection.
As the stars will not be harvested,
the subjects of the sun will not be bound.
Morning,
not the clang of hammers
or the clink of chain,
is the true reality -
the friend, the life, the romance
we know best.
-
Chosen by J.H. |
