Homework: I will never catch up at this rate, so I am doing today's assignment today.

~Write a line from a song or poem that speaks to you. Explain why.

I have always had a flair for the dramatic. The romantic. The passionate. Maybe flair isn't the right word. Need, perhaps? Absolute craving? I guess that my life is so commonplace and secure that, even as a kid, I delighted in the scandalous and the overly ridiculous. If I could have watched soaps as a child, I am sure I would have reveled in the medium.

Now the years, they went by, and Old Shep, he grew old.
His eyesight had long since grown dim.
And then one day the doctor looked at me and said,
"I can't do no more for him, Jim."
With a hand that was trembling, I picked up my gun
And I held it at Shep's faithful head.
But I just couldn't do it; I wanted to run
I wish they would shoot me instead.

I would beg my grandfather to sing me sad cowboy songs--I cried and then asked for more.

And when it was night, how great was their fright!
The stars did not shine, the moon gave no light.
They sobbed and they sighed, and they bitterly cried,
'Til finally those babies lay down and they died.
Oh, don't you remember those babes in the woods?
Poor, poor, babes in the woods.

Poetry was just as intoxicating as songs were, especially the tragic ballads. When we had to memorize a poem in fourth grade, most of my classmates memorized something from Uncle Shelby; I went down a road with more pathos.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Can't you just swim in the tragedy? And I never outgrew it. High school had me eschewing Ginsberg (a perennial favorite among the Honors Set) for Yeats.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

College introduced me to this gem from Donne, which proved perfectly pathetic, especially considering my choice in a spouse, and his choice in a career.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And now? Well, I will give you a guess as to Jooj's favorite song that I sing. Hint: It features a dead canine. And I often read poetry to her in bed. Lately I have been reading her Leslie Norris.

How long I stood with ghosts of the wild fists
And the cries of shaken boys long dead around me,
For struck to act at last, in terror and pity
I threw some frantic money, three treacherous pence -

And I cry at the memory - into his tray, and ran,
Entering waves of the stadium like a drowning man.
Poor Billy Rose. God, he could fight
Before my three sharp coins knocked out his sight.

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