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'Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.'
(From 'The Song of Wandering Aengus')
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Highlights From Summer Art Expo 2022:
Photography by Marsanges
My friend, in a winter jacket in cold rain
sinks away into a dark miasma.
The ‘sharp angled peacock’ moth, macaria alternata.
Casts a dramatic shadow, as if it had a hidden wild soul,
although it just is a little peaceful insect
whose caterpillars live on willow and birch.
The big spider is not far.
I hope it knows its business.
-Marsanges
Moths: Idaea humiliata, Macaria alternata, Eupithecia subumbrata
PAINTING BY RALPHDOG
Drawing by niemann
Sketches and Studies by Nolana
Photo by gizmo59
Photography by Trot
Frogs
I did not see the toad that lives in my shop sitting on the shipping blanket. As I lifted the blanket from the floor the toad jumped off. I told her that I would bring the blanket back as soon as I could.
She was cool about it.
Turtles
The vegetation around the game cam I have set up on the creek will grow up in the summer to the point that the camera can’t see anything so I use a string trimmer to clear out the tall grass in front of the camera occasionally. Today as I was trimming I saw something fly out from the cutter. I thought it was a frog and that I had wounded it. It was a magnolia leaf, but I saw a momma turtle laying eggs just after that. I stayed away from her. I looked for her as I was leaving the area and saw that she had moved to the edge of where I cut, waiting for her chance to make a break for it.
The Aspie wrote a love poem
You got my heart beating at scouring velocity I bet
The colors of your paint job would be Flambeau and desert sunset
You got more juice than a Holley 650 double pump carburetor
As kind and cool as the interior of a 68 continental coach door
Your mouth was built with the precision of a go no go gauge
Your voice the soothing hum of a well-bathed metal lath
With a mind that’s as on point as a floor-mounted drill press
The drafting baton that laid down your lines, curvaceous
Another thing I noticed is you shine brighter than chrome
With the simple yet complex beauty of a geodesic dome
-by Hay Seed
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A Memorial for RedWoodMan
(1950- 2021)
'When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever'
—KURT VONNEGUT
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'The Solstice Heron'
By 6412093
(aka RedwoodMan)
(1950- 2021)
~
I'm having a kind of vision
of how my neighbor Ted sees me-
He is a Born-Aginner, but gentle and humble.
~
He hears me singing poorly
and dancing naked under the moon
with the frogs shredding hard, and it stirs his own Celtic roots.…
~
He sees me gain and lose weight and hair and joke about Celtic medicine
when he thought Christ had dominion over miracle cures.
~
He's an outdoors type.
But my backyard frogs and my heron overflights make him uneasy,
as if out of place in the Suburbs.
~
Maybe that's when he discovers
possibly, that his wife is actually a Selkie-
and she takes off with me
who has transformed into a Heron...
Or the frogs or the heron,
will then save his Life.
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Into The Red Wood
Hair showing auburn in photos,
Face burned bronze pink from years of sun.
Silently he must turn now,
Tears just contained,
To join the world that he so loves
Directly, intensely, personally.
To become an elemental part
Of all creation.
He will shed pain
Distortion
The myriad unkindnesses of human life
And all tragedies mourned.
With him goes love
And all that love remembers.
The body discarded
Sinks into loam.
A newborn Dryad rises, smiles,
Shakes out abundant hair
That rustles like leaves,
Steps confidently towards
A welcoming tree.
(poem below by Angmar for RWM)
~
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Well Beyond Midnight
Dry rustle of treetops,
agitated by the wind- well beyond midnight,
dress again
and then I walk, through streets empty
Beneath the copper glowing streetlamps.
Only life a shadowy turbulence, moths beat themselves into glows
at the periphery of my vision
But sometimes,in silhouette
A something seeming - movement possibly
of friends who passed gone forever
Into the endless, movement of Time.
(For RWM)
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September Midnight
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.
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