Four Ramblers brought
readings this week: Emily Carr, Kittie Everett, Rosemary Woodel and Hugh
Nourse.
Martha Walker shared some
interesting recipes that she found on the internet; these feature Locust
blossoms and Sweet Woodruff.
Emily's reading is from from Jane Yolen's Color Me a Rhyme: Nature Poems for Young People, pp. 8-9.
Green
Whichever angel had the task
of naming greens, squatting
on the hard new ground,
robe guttering at his perfect feet,
did not do his work well.
He gave us chartreuse, olive, leek,
emerald, ivy, beryl.
But they are not nearly enough
when the world is so much green.
Ferns, trees, grass, stems,
petals, limbs, leaves,
the soft mallow inside
each piece of greenware
deserve separate names.
Perhaps the world needed
a poet, not an angel,
because poets know
all the secret words,
some of which they make up,
all of which are
green.
Kittie's reading is from The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen,
who died this past week. (This is the only book to have won two National Book
Awards.)
Wind brings swift, soft clouds from the south that cast shadows
on the snow. Close at hand, a redstart comes to forage
in the lichens, followed soon by a flock of fat rose finches.
I do not stir, yet suddenly all whir away in a gray gust, and minutely I turn to see what might have scared them. On a
rock not thirty feet away, an acipitrine (ak-sipitrin) hawk sits in silhouette
against the mountains, and here it hunches while the sun goes down, nape
feathers lifting in the wind, before diving after unseen prey over the rim of
the ravine.
Then the great Lammergeier (Iam-mer-gei-er) (a vulture) comes, gold-headed and black-collared, a nine-foot blade sweeping down
out of the north it passes in the shadows between cliffs. Where the river
turns, in a corner of the walls,
the late sun shines on a
green meadow, as if a lost world lay in that impenetrable ravine, so far below.
The great bird arcs round the wall, light glances from its mantle. Then it is gone,
and the sun goes, the
meadow vanishes, and the cold falls with the night shadow.
Rosemary brought a seasonal quote
from Red Skelton:
Spring
is sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where the birdies is.
Hugh's reading is from A Thousand
Mile Walk to the Gulf, by John Muir, whose birthday was April 21.
I think
that most of the antipathies which haunt and terrify are morbid productions of
ignorance and weakness. I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I
have seen them at home. Honorable representatives of the great saurians of an
older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now
and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty!
Black Locust is either blooming
or about to do so and Martha found this Locust Blossom Celebration
that tells you how to enjoy the flowers as either food or drink.
Martha also located a recipe
for May Wine with Sweet Woodruff. Those of you who have access to this herb
will enjoy this.
