Bestselling Author – 359th Fighter Group Historian
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Pleasures lie thickest where no pleasures seem:
There’s not a leaf that falls upon the ground
But holds some joy of silence or of sound,
Some spirits begotten of a summer dream.
~ Laman Blanchard.
Are not the forest fringes wet
With tears? Is not the voice of all regret
Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart?
She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though
She turned last night in disdain
Away from the sunset-embers,
From her soul she can never depart;
She can never depart from her pain.
Vainly she strives to forget;
Beautiful in her woe,
She awakes in the dawn and remembers.
~ Alfred Noyes
…the starlings are chattering, quarreling and laughing,
whispering and quietly enjoying themselves,
when suddenly a blustering as of ten thousand pairs
of sharp-edged scissors
passes through the republic of the plains–
it is as though an alarm had sounded,
heard as an echo over the muffled traffic.
Soon the darkness of night will fall.
But the starlings up there won’t stop talking,
they move together, push one another, chatter and flit.
~ Jesper Svenbro
Somewhere always is an everywhere
Where the mountains and the snow grow down
In time, until, in winter’s deep sleep, time
Grows balanced, and in quiet you can climb
A mountain and the snow no one can own
Because in afternoon sunshine, time’s there.
~ David Rothman
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass…
~ G. K. Chesterton
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
~ William Carlos William.
Janet Fogg / J.R.P. Fogg 