One of the

"A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation."

Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

On a blade of grass

I was born on a blade of grass,

Yet before the year came to pass

I could've turned into a cricket.

I grew up to become a man –

I clean forgot how it began –

Yet I'm as thin as a bus ticket.

A cloud fathered me in Spring

While the sun was a-turning

To get a better sleeping position.

The wind raised me like her kin

Made me float across the plains

As if I were a gamin o' the halcyon.

During that summer when I was born,

Fire undid stone, wind undid metal,

Bees wrought beehives the size of cathedrals

And bulls grew a new pair of horns.

Words broke down at the first spell of rain,

Showering letters like smithereens –

Untold stories laid still in brackish puddles.

Prophecies abounded in those bygone times.

One told of the cataclysm I spoke about.

It all happened in the wink of an eye.

The sound and the fury were unleashed,

Shaking nightshades on their stem.

Then some sort of silence prevailed.

Then everything stood still.

As if every sentient life form

Were playing statues.

Yet 'tis another one which mattered,

Which altered the very breaths I drew.

It told of my love for a poppy.

She turned out to be the prettiest thing I had ever seen.

She once said I was the only one around

Who was actually too thin

To shade her with my string-like self.

She smiled and smiled and smiled.

Satchels of time I had aplenty

Yet she made me live without her.

She left. She left. She looked sorry.

The end, which already comes too soon,

She made come even sooner.

Timesands trickling from the moon.

For one morning Poppy was nowhere to be found.

Never did I, or anyone, see her again.

As if she had never existed.

As if she had been but a dream.

As if she had been out of time,

All this time. All the time.

Words crumbled where her roots had been.

Butterflies did lose their colours,

But no other calamity befell.

For me the world an empty shell.

Lying face down in the dirt

Or wriggling into some fissure

And ask the stars if they'd seen her go.

Yet their vigil had been futile.

Not even the trace of a root was to be found.

As if she had vaporised.

I was born on a blade of grass,

One rainy Monday afternoon.

Next day my cheek was pressed

On the mirroring pane of a raindrop.

I sighed.

The weariness I felt then was the same as now's.

She had me wait, then she went.

She needn't have gone this far if she fled.

She should have fought if brutal force took her.

I could have gone through hell for her.

I would have fought God had He been the one to blame.

I cannot live without the possibility of her love.

I don't know where she was born.

I don't know if she loved me.

Did she have friends apart from me?

Can she know I rue the day she was torn?

Fact is: her smile shone like a star.

Her petals had the radiance of fireflies

And the promptness of lightning.

Oftentimes did the mist embrace her.

She never looked so bright as then.

Mayhap she deemed me too lean.

Mayhap she was all deceit and lies.

Mayhap she felt nothing but scorn.

Mayhap we are wrong to mourn.

Mayhap she hastened her demise.

Natheless she probably was

All things considered

Standing on a blade of grass

– Yes – the being I loved

The most.

Most of us

"We all have to rise in the end, not just one or two who were smart enough, had will enough for their own salvation, but all the halt, the maimed and the blind of us which is most of us."

Maureen Duffy, poet, playwright, and novelist (b. 1933)

Under the wind

"We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike."

Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

Unquestioning

"The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin."

Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

The hills yonder

"I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could."

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

Walks of Life

"The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life -- the sick, the needy and the handicapped."

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, US Vice President (1911-1978)

Hngng tgthr

"You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?"

Jane Smiley, novelist (b.1949)

Wrong kind of feeling

"The worst kind of people are those who confuse kindness for weakness."

Werner Makowski, banker (b. 1929)

Construction

"Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body."

Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)