Old School Post

I never know what to say or what to write.

I miss the good old days of blogging.  I was talking to someone about the old days.  I randomly went to July '05 and there it was post after post with 2 comments or 3 or 6 or 14.  Some had 0, but not most. Today it seems like if a blogger wants a response he or she has to become a Facebooker. I haven't written this in a long time - here it comes. Wait for it. Sigh.

Unsaid 
By Dana Gioia

So much of what we live goes on inside–
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

I've posted that poem before.  But it feels right right now. 

Here's another one I've posted before and really like.

The Lanyard

By Billy Collins

"The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past --
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift--not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

This video has really fitting images to match the poem, but the words go by a bit too quickly so I say read it above (hope you did) and then watch the video. 

I feel like I  could write here forever, but I can't.

As I said in the old days, Good night and G-d bless.