(no subject)

[postscrypt.livejournal.com]

"I Shall Paint My Nails Red" 

        by Carole Satyamurti (b.1939)

Because a bit of color is a public service.

Because I am proud of my hands.

Because it will remind me I’m a woman.

Because I will look like a survivor.

Because I can admire them in traffic jams.

Because my daughter will say “ugh!”.

Because my lover will be surprised.

Because it is quicker than dyeing my hair.

Because it is a ten-minute moratorium.

Because it is reversible.

Dodo

[writemeout.livejournal.com]

Henry Carlile, "Dodo"

Years they mistook me for you,
chanting your name in the streets,
pointing grubby fingers.
Today in the natural history museum
I saw why.
Dodo, you look the way I feel,
with your sad absentminded eyes
and your beak like a stone-age axe.
Even your feathers
dingy and fuzzy.
What woman would want them for a hat?

With a name like Didus ineptus
where could you go,
wings too small to fly with
and feet so large and slow?
You were not very palatable.
Men slaughtered you for sport.
Hogs ate the one egg you laid each year.
Sometimes I think I know how it feels
to be scattered over the world,
a foot in the British Museum,
a head in Copenhagen,
to be a lesson after the fact,
an entity in name only,
and that taken in vain.

(no subject)

[spence137.livejournal.com]

I Didn't Go To Church Today

By Ogden Nash


I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The sea was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather.
He knows when I am said and done,
We'll have a plenty of time together.