1) I’m going to visit my sweet little niece this weekend. Of course, she’s not old enough for Winnie the Pooh yet (6 weeks!), but she will be before you know it! (This also means the PotD will be on hiatus until I get back next week.)

2) We are having some insane winds (again). I got home from work yesterday to find my flagpole on the ground, and this morning I saw the trellis in the back had been blown over. (The flagpole is in the garage, but I’m not sure how I’m going to fix the trellis since I’m leaving shortly after I get home from work and it’s too dark now to mess with it now.)

Wind on the Hill
By A.A. Milne

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’?t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

A Son with a Future
By Charles Reznikoff

When he was four years old, he stood at the window during a
   thunderstorm. His father, a tailor, sat on the table sewing.
   He came up to his father and said, “I know what makes
   thunder: two clouds knock together.”
When he was older, he recited well-known rants at parties.
   They all said that he would be a lawyer.
At law school he won a prize for an essay. Afterwards, he
   became the chum of an only son of rich people. They
   were said to think the world of the young lawyer.
The Appellate Division considered the matter of his disbarment.
   His relatives heard rumours of embezzlement.

When a boy, to keep himself at school, he had worked in a
   drug store.
Now he turned to this half-forgotten work, among perfumes
   and pungent drugs, quiet after the hubble-bubble of the
   courts and the search in law books.
He had just enough money to buy a drug store in a side
   street.
Influenza broke out. The old tailor was still keeping his shop
   and sitting cross-legged on the table sewing, but he was
   half-blind.
He, too, was taken sick. As he lay in bed he thought, “What a
   lot of money doctors and druggists must be making; now
   is my son’s chance.”
They did not tell him that his son was dead of influenza.

The Garden Buddha
By Peter Pereira

Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distance—always

the same bountiful smile upon his portly face.
Why don’t I share his one-minded happiness?
The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia,
filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia

and yearning. He’s laughing at me, isn’t he?
The seasons wheeling despite my photographs
and notes, my desire to make them pause.
Is that the lesson? That stasis, this holding on,

is not life? Now I’m smiling, too—the late cherry,
its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter;
the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers
exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.

The Rider
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

Time Travel
By Ian Beckett

I was fifty-three this morning,
But I feel so much older now,
Having lived a lifetime in a day.

It started like a thousand others,
Time suddenly skipped a track,
Everyone I know is dead and gone—

I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
I never knew that time was precious,
This morning was a hundred years ago.

Yellowjackets
By Yusef Komunyakaa

When the plowblade struck
An old stump hiding under
The soil like a beggar’s
Rotten tooth, they swarmed up
& Mister Jackson left the plow
Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon.
The horse was midnight
Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s
Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not
The way women shook their heads
Before mirrors at the five
& dime—a deeper connection
To the low field’s evening star.
He stood there, in tracechains,
Lathered in froth, just
Stopped by a great, goofy
Calmness. He whinnied
Once, & then the whole
Beautiful, blue-black sky
Fell on his back.

Aunt Helen
By T.S. Eliot

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet —
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees —
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

Truly Pathetic
By Neal Bowers

Lately, the weather aches;
the air is short of breath,
and morning stumbles in, stiff-jointed.

Day by day, the sun bores the sky,
until the moon begins
its some disappearing act,
making the oceans yawn.

Even the seasons change
with a throb of weariness—
bud, bloom, leaf, fall.

If it would help,
I would paint my house silver
or sell it or buy
a red convertible.

I would, but who am I
to try to cheer up
the self-indulgent universe.

Antilamentation
By Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Major Anderson
By J.H. Elliot

February, 1861

Upheld and nerved by God’s unswerving arm,
   Fearless and brave, lion-hearted in the right,
   An armed host in thine own single might,
In storm and tempest, dauntless still and calm;
   Honored by men, by loyal women loved,
The pride and boast of all thy countrymen,
   The Cynosure of all eyes, still unmoved,
Th’ inspiring genius of the Poet’s pen;
   While threatening clouds hang darkly o’er they head,
Thy strong right arm is the whole nation’s head;
We trust in thee, thee and thy gallant band;
   ”They saved their country’s honor!” shall be read
On History’s future page. Thy noble arduous duty done,
America shall know no prouder name than
   ANDERSON.