What life?

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God

            T.S. Eliot, from The Rock

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

            Margaret Atwood

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look upward

I avoid looking forward or backward,
and try to keep looking upward.
This is not the time to regret, dread, or weep.
What I have and ought to do
is very distinctly laid out for me;
what I want, and pray for, is strength to perform it.

    Charlotte Bronte, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell

 

 

 

 

 

A pricey question

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

        Ali Smith, Autumn 

 

 

 

 

Unintended consequences, or you never know when you will make a difference

I did not get on the bus to get arrested.
    I got on the bus to go home.

            Rosa Parks, Time magazine, 1999

Decisions, decisions

When I’m not sure whether something is okay to do,
I find it helps to give it the worst spin
in the bluntest language possible,
then judge it from there.

        Carolyn Hax, Washington Post advice column, January 2026 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Groundhog Day

Well, what if there is no tomorrow?! There wasn't one today!

            Phil Conners, in the movie Groundhog Day
            Written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis.