first they were just clouds they swelled, swirled, hung very still … then they broke open
My first thought seeing this cloud over Red Cedar Elementary School in Bluffon, SC was that someone finally stumbled upon that atomic bomb the US Air Force lost over Tybee Island back in the ’50’s.
My second thought was of that Alien spacecraft over Los Angeles in the movie, Independence Day.
Then I thought of the poem, Clouds, by Mary Oliver in her book, Why I Wake Early: New Poems (Beacon Press, Boston, 2005) and I thought that this is, I suppose, just one of the common miracles, a transformation, not a vision, not an answer, not a proof, but I put it there, close against my heart, where the need is, and its serves the purpose.
Clouds by Mary Oliver
All afternoon, sir, your ambassadors have been turning into lakes and rivers. At first they were just clouds, like any other. Then they swelled and swirled; then they hung very still’ then they broke open. This is, I suppose, just one of the common miracles, a transformation, not a vision, not an answer, not a proof, but I put it there, close against my heart, where the need is, and its serves
the purpose. I go on, soaked through, my hair slicked back; like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.
light mixed with it look with divided vision see the reflection
Adapted from:
All our Concord waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand.
The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate color.
The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere.
I have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass.
Some consider blue “to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid.”
But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors.
Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view.
Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.
Viewed from a hill-top it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond.
Like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison.
From Walden or, Life in the Woods, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston and ; New York , 1897 Edition).
who denies freedom to others, deserves it not … cannot retain it
Today’s haiku is based on the following letter written in 1859.
Springfield, Ills, April 6, 1859
Messrs. Henry L. Pierce, & others.
Gentlemen
Your kind note inviting me to attend a Festival in Boston, on the 13th. Inst. in honor of the birth-day of Thomas Jefferson, was duly received. My engagements are such that I can not attend.
Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago, two great political parties were first formed in this country, that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them, and Boston the head-quarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jefferson should now be celebrating his birthday in their own original seat of empire, while those claiming political descent from him have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere.
Remembering too, that the Jefferson party were formed upon its supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior, and then assuming that the so-called democracy of to-day, are the Jefferson, and their opponents, the anti-Jefferson parties, it will be equally interesting to note how completely the two have changed hands as to the principle upon which they were originally supposed to be divided.
The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property. Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
I remember once being much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have perfomed the same feat as the two drunken men.
But soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.
One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.
One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.”
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect–the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard–the miners, and sappers–of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Your obedient Servant A. Lincoln
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
Can we choose up sides based on that last?
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves?
No Haiku For You 