Hold fast to the dream

The republic is a dream
Nothing happens unless first a dream.

    Carl Sandburg, Washington Monument by Night, stanza 4

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The High-School Lawn

Gray prinked with rose,
White tipped with blue,
Shoes with gay hose,
Sleeves of chrome hue;
Fluffed frills of white,
Dark bordered light;
Such shimmerings through
Trees of emerald green are eyed
This afternoon, from the road outside.

They whirl around:
Many laughters run
With a cascade's sound;
Then a mere one.

A bell: they flee:
Silence then: —
So it will be
Some day again
With them, — with me. 

                Thomas Hardy

 

 

 

 

 

 

The quest

We spend our life, it's ours,
trying to bring together in the same instant
a ray of sunshine and a free bench... 

            Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your own village

That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.
Your own village means that you're not alone,
that you know there's something of you
in the people and the plants and the soil,
that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

            Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A glimpse of nothing

Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York,
a place on the plains that I love,
a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles,
she asked, "But what is there to see?"
The answer, of course, is nothing.
Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.

            Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

 

 

 

 

 

Hindsight

When we look back,
the only things we cherish
are those which in some way met our original want;
the desire which formed in us in early youth,
undirected, and of its own accord.

            Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

 

 

 

 

 

Paradigm of infinity

Whatever else prairie is—grass, sky, wind—
it is most of all a paradigm of infinity,
a clearing full of many things except boundaries,
and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness;
there is no such thing as a small prairie
any more than there is a little ocean,
and the consequence of both is this challenge:
try to take yourself seriously out here,
you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon.

                William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth