Category Archives: Inspirations

What Kind of Times Are These By Adrienne Rich There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t beContinue reading “Monday’s Muse”

Obligations 2                       As we               embrace          resist                            the future       the present      the past          Continue reading “Monday and a Muse”

Poppy ~ Tomaz Salamun Cover up the people when I step into the room.Throw blankets, tents and powdered milk on them.Bury them in the soil, I’m a hamster.Wrap them in gauze. Draw crosses over their mouths.There’s a fire in the Laurentian Library.Breathe bread and soil and rain, choke your children with the brand of oars.Continue reading “A Muse for Monday”

She was annoyed that I was trying to take a picture. She swooped aggressively up and back from the grape arbor to the volunteer milkweed stand by the new well. I thought if I stood still enough she would settle but instead she watched me. She flew far off to the garden so I steppedContinue reading “Monday’s Muse”

Virginia Woolf ~ Indigo Girls Some will strut and some will fretSee this an hour on the stageOthers will not but they’ll sweatIn their hopelessness and their rageWe’re all the same the men of angerAnd women of the pageThey published your diaryAnd that’s how I got to know youThe key to the room of yourContinue reading “Musings On a Monday”

from the collection Tender by Laiwan

Yellow-Rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) Maine’s earliest returning warbler each spring, arriving before most trees have leafed out. Yellow rump is one of the most obvious features, inspiring the nickname “butter butts” among birders, though other warblers also have that field mark. Yellow-rumps also have two white wingbars, a “necklace” of dark streaks on upper breast,Continue reading “Monday’s Musing: Book at Hand”

Dogfish Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thingkept flickering in with the tideand looking around.Black as a fisherman’s boot,with a white belly. If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smileunder the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,which was roughas a thousand sharpened nails. And you knowwhat a smile means,don’tContinue reading “A Muse for a Monday”

Mother’s Day Proclamation:  An International Plea For Peace ~ Julia Ward Howe, 1870 (part-time resident of Gardiner, ME) Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking withContinue reading “Monday’s Muse: Mother’s Day Proclamation”