All quiet on the Middle Eastern Front

Hiya, folks.

Not much going on here at present: kids are in school, Jon's at work, Wendy's in post-kid rehab. The usual.

The earthquake off the coast of Iran apparently rattled some cages in Dubai and Abu Dhabi: buildings more than 10 stories high were evacuated as a precaution, but nothing happened. The attack on the US Embassy in Yemen was 24 hours away by car (Sherry's estimate), and do not in any direct way impact us here. So don't worry about us.

Oh, good news on the LDS front: some new members, including a couple of families, have broadened the base and brightened the hopes. Still looking for a new seat: some good leads last week. Will keep you posted.

Here's a cool thing: we've seen the like of this before, but I dig the way this guy rolls. And overall, I'd say the years have been relatively kind.

Guy Photographs Himself Every Day For 17 Years | Viral | SPIKE.com

Also, some verse to mystify, and mebbe delight. Don't hurt yourselves.

Poetry


Poetry isn’t just
Assigning colours to things:

To say “pink expectation”
(Though the marriage

Suggests the flush along
The neck and cheekbones

Of a young heart
Looking for its lover).

It isn’t just
The parsing of a glimpse

Or feeling into figure,
The making of a shape.

It is the intersect
Of these things and

Of rhythm, the purblind
Consternation of the grammar

Of the mind, the languid,
Seasalt tripping of the tongue

In licking waves
And airborne keening songs.



Os Iris
(for Iris Murdoch)

Hale priestess, limber in tendon and synapse,
Loose of tongue and loose of clacking finger,
Unkempt and unkept by will or will,
You clambered down the ditches and the wells
Of human thought, and brought us back the skulls
Of clowns and princes, dense with soil still,
As if the fertile brains of them could linger
Or death were just imagination’s lapse.

And then you left, your memory grown faint from feint
And with that memory all sane restraint.
You left a something richer, shorn of cover,
Bare and naked as an angry lover,
Your failing brain and tongue a revelation
Of the black, fragile soil of our condition:
The dilemma that awaits all kings and clowns.
Dear Iris, how we miss your trembling bones.



Have a good week. We'll get into some trouble on our end so we have something interesting to post about.

Peace out.