23Skidoo

     I use my Yahoo home page and get feeds for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, YALSA, Public Library Association, Wired, TreeHugger etc. It’s a good way to bring together news that interests me in one place, especially book reviews.

 

How To Paint A Water Lily

Ted Hughes

To Paint a Water Lily

 A green level of lily leaves

Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves

The flies’ furious arena: study

These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air’s dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by

 Or stands in space to take aim;

Others as dangerous comb the hum

 Under the trees. There are battle-shouts

And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise

To see the colours of these flies

 Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle

Cooling like beads of molten metal

 Through the spectrum. Think what worse

is the pond-bed’s matter of course;

 Prehistoric bedragoned times

Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

 Have evolved no improvements there,

Jaws for heads, the set stare,

 Ignorant of age as of hour—

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

 Which, deep in both worlds, can be still

As a painting, trembling hardly at all

 Though the dragonfly alight,

Whatever horror nudge her root.

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