simile, not epic enough

Kanakambaram seeds that have been watered in high summer are like that older kid you used to know on the playground who slapped you while smiling playfully so that you could not allege bullying even though it stung like heck.

Planting books

I like Thursdays. Significant things happen to me on Thursdays - sometimes important, often life-changing, mostly pleasant. Thursdays are to my week what Februaries are to my year.

So after the rage and restlessness of yesterday, I was delighted to wake up and find this in my mail: a link to Richard Brautigan's 1968 Please Plant This Book. (Thanks, KM). It's lovely and sweet and if 1968 and the hopes it contained for the 21st Century seems impossibly innocent, I have to remind myself that the world was not a particularly pleasant place then, just as today is not particularly hopeless.

Regenerating anything - even words - by planting them and watching them grow, grow out and disperse, has always been an attractive idea. This book must have been a lovely artefact; it still is a lovely set of poems.

Here's:

Squash

The time is right to mix sentences 
sentences with dirt and the sun 
with punctuation and the rain with 
verbs, and for worms to pass 
through question marks, and the 
stars to shine down on budding 
nouns, and the dew to form on 
paragraphs.
                       Richard Brautigan, 1968

 

spring

One day we imagine we have to cut the Jerul down because its branches look dead. Another day we imagine we see hard nubs all along the branch but we're not sure, not even when the tree is so close to the window we could touch the leaves - if it had any.

Then one day, the leaves burst out and they grow every day, faster even than small children, and - if you but had the patience and the eyes of a stop-motion camera - you could see them change shape and colour and fill out the blank spaces on the branches.

brown-green=shiny new

Seconds earlier there was a bird. Here is the evidence.

New leaves for old