The Minnesota countryside yesterday, between Rochester and Northfield, offered mesmerizing cloudscapes and inspired today’s poem: “Whiplash Weather.” The images here are in chronological order.
Okay! “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.” It is still dark out here. Time for the clarity that only “clouds in my coffee” can offer! (Apologies to lyrical goddesses Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon.)
Until tomorrow,
LESLIE
Context for Today’s Poem, “Golden Lamp”
Each year, I am entranced by this display of forsythia in a garden two blocks from my house. The color is startling and brilliant, and, unlike, is complement, the blue and white scilla that carpets our city, it is boldly upright.
Yesterday, I got to see it behind a haze of spring snow–a true emblem of our weather this April.
Happy Easter!
LESLIE
ICI Macarons & Cafe is a Philadelphia icon that Julia and I stumbled upon in March of 2016 during a college visit to the east coast. I stumbled on prints–not footprints but stacks of photograph– this morning as Tim helped me find images that might spark today’s poem. I had forgotten completely about this moment and this place, but the photograph brought it back, down to the very taste of the mint macaron and the creamy punch of the cafe latte.
Just this morning, I discovered that this splendid place, ICI, is an immigrant success story–aren’t we all?
If you scroll down, you’ll see a delivery vehicle for another culinary success story in Philadephia, A Peace of Pizza, who offer delicious fare AND a way to pay it forward by feeding homeless people. (Click on the link to see the NPR story on them.) Philadelphia is one of our oldest cities, and it is still alive with our founding values.
I also reflected that as exciting and educational as travel is for me, its most reliable effect is the way it gives me a fresh sense of the value of home–the essential need to be ‘at home’ wherever you are. (Or, as I first read on a Mary Englebreit card, “Wherever you go, there you are.”)
Below are a few of my favorite images from that trip ten years ago to Philadelphia, a city so important to our national identity, our identification with personal liberty and collective “liberty and justice for all,” the pledge we all learned in kindergarten.
All these images and insights–infused for me with memory and whimsy–merged into the poem for today, “ICI.”
LESLIE
(I suspect the images from this trip might spark another poem this month–stay tuned!)
The Cloud Appreciation Society is a non-profit devoted to celebrating the beauty and science of clouds. Some years ago, a generous friend (thank you, Ann!) who has known me well for more than 4 decades gifted me with a subscription to the daily “Cloud-a-Day” post. Since then, I have become even more committed to photographing what I would otherwise forget: these information laden wisps of beauty passing overhead, no two every quite the same.
Regular readers might remember three previous posts mentioning this sterling organization.
Context for the Poem “Enlightenment:
This morning, I awoke thinking the elusive term “enlightenment” before the sun was up, and also about the way the sky looked here two days ago, just before the soaking rains arrived delivering an inch or more of ice-cold water, and I was glad to have snapped a few images of the eastern view from my front porch.
Today’s poem was sparked by a New York Times crossword clue. I am a devotee of this word game 365 days a year. I always learn something new. Usually the new snippet of knowledge is something from the worlds of sports or contemporary music or television shows or popular culture in general, areas where I have gaping deficits. (I do just fine with Latin phrases, classical mythology, U.S. presidents long out of office, world geography, Victorian literature, and extinct automobiles like the Edsel.)
Today, I learned that the Statue of Liberty’s internal stairs, the structure allowing humans to climb up for sweeping views of New York City’s harbor and skyline, is actually two intertwining staircases! Yes, 162 steps up and 162 steps down encircling each other, step by step, in the form of a double helix. I have never (yet!) visited Liberty Island but since girlhood I have longed to do so. Soon! Meanwhile, I travel there in my imagination rather often.
I do not think my own sparked poem, “Inside Liberty,” will become a deathless classic, like the sonnet engraved at the base of our shared icon, written by Emma Lazarus:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus
(This poem is in the public domain.
In 1903, the lines were inscribed onto a bronze plaque
and attached at the base of the Statue of Liberty.)
I did, however, enjoy a few hours of thinking about this subject, noticing again the coin on the money clip in my wallet, passed down to me by my father, and thinking about what is of value in the traits and ideas we inherit and pass on. I was especially struck by the intention of welcome designed into the Statue of Liberty–and her eloquent, silent commentary on current events. I hope you enjoy these photos of actual currency, and that your days are spent in richly rewarding ways!
LESLIE
