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