1. Last day of school for the boys is tomorrow. There was supposed to be a picnic at Minisculus' but it's too wet. Tonight is a ceremony at the middle school (not a graduation--they have stressed that) and then Minor is staying for the 8th grade dance.

2. I noticed something interesting (to me) last week during the ceiling catastrophe. I missed drinking any coffee Tuesday because I was in exile, but I didn't notice it. I didn't get that nail-being-driven-in-the-temple headache I normally get. Like, nothing, no physical sign that I was caffeine deprived. So maybe the anxiety adrenaline of the ceiling held it at bay? I don't know. I'm just making an observation. I started to feel it on Day 2 but I got some coffee and of course it went away

3. I'm about halfway through The Seamstress by Maria Duenas and enjoying it. It's an epic life story of a woman from Spain who lives in Morocco during the Civil War. I'm at the even of WWII now. Finished Bridge to Teribithia with Minisculus and now we're reading something called Clementine which is the typical 'kid does pranks and gets into trouble' story.

4. I cracked open a new jigsaw: Around the Word in 50 Plants.

5. No news from the Visiting Angels. :( I'm hoping everything is okay. I uploaded the COVID vaccine info per request but it's been crickets for a week.

6. I REALLY need to get cracking on my casefic for the exchange.

7. I like train ambient channels:



6.

This weeks' prompt was: color. This is called an In Memorium stanza.

drupe by okapi

of orange-yellows, reds which leach
in blush upon the most sun-kissed
of rounded flesh, in velvet mist
enveloped, casting fog on each

and every curvature whose breach
reveals a more uniform gold
of corpus, sweet perfumes unfold,
attracting wasps and buyers, speech

is needless, scent alone can preach
its Good News, bushel baskets filled
to rolling, dark hearts hedged and grilled
by dark nettles which overreach

on pitting, nectar colors teach
the artist how to mix the rich,
the once-child to remember, stitch
a patch of farmer’s market peach

I did this one before the chaos with the ceiling. I like the three jars on the other page of the planner so I included them in the scan. Still going with the peach theme for June.

Title: I is for [Requiescat] In Pace
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 5 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson
Prompt: acidic
Warning: Major Character Death
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes (for the fifth times) and elects not to accompany Holmes to the Falls.

( Read more... )

Title: I is for Incarnate
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Notes: Angst, part 3 of Time Loop: Reichenbach, set during "The Final Problem, this is a linked series of ficlets in which Watson relives Reichenbach based on theories collated in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes about what happened on that day.
Length: 500
Characters: Holmes & Watson & Moriarty & Moran
Prompt: timid
Warning: Major Character Death, elements of the supernatural
Summary: Watson wakes up on 4 May 1891 in Switzerland with Holmes and discovers Moriarty more than what he seems.

( Read more... )

So I am a week behind on my 52 poem challenge. Last week the prompt was to write a poem about a famous person (who is dead) and the focus is on a small incident in their lives. So I chose Rilke and found an anecdote about how he had received a business letter and was composing a response, pacing near the castle where he was staying, and the first line of the first of the Duino Elegies came to him. So that's what I wrote about.


Dear Sir: Regarding a matter which requires your urgent attention... by okapi

The letter arrived in the morning post.
The envelope was dull, the lettering
was careful and upright. The poet sighed.
He slit the shroud, unfolded the dead words,
and read and sighed again. It must be deal with.
Sums would be required. On paper too fine
for the purpose, he began then stopped, stood,
and left, marching from castle to bastions
overlooking the sea, he paced the length,
back and forth, as the strong bora wind blew,
his mind was full of numbers and figures,
back and forth, he paced, back and forth until—
he heard it
on the roar—
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?”
by nightfall, there would be a birth, a verse
long-awaited as well as a piece
of correspondence, dull, careful, upright
left unanswered on the edge of a desk.


---

And here is the first stanza of the first elegy of the Duino Elegies

from The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke [trans. Stephen Mitchell}

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.