FLIGHT PLAN |
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Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99
A Thought for Today
Anger breeds revenge, revenge brings ruin.
The regular daily Flight Plan will be
suspended for a few weeks while I'm away helping Webmaster Ken Blackie work out the design
and content of our upcoming STANYAN HOUSE web site. I hope you'll continue landing here
ever day though because Jay Hagan and Melinda Smith have chosen two poems from a different
one of my books for every day that I'm gone.
So, something new will be here every morning. The Thought for Today and the Notable
Birthdays will continue. See you soon.
Love, Rod
Four Poems from
"And to Each Season, "by Rod McKuen.
Entr'acte
We were in love that summer
and birds about the sky
were singing with themselves,
carols I cannot remember,
though I do recall
the color of the
trees
and the things I thought
but never said to you.
I thought of San Francisco
and the bridge being painted
even when it wasn't spring.
I thought about
the loneliness of oceans,
of Colorado snow
and writing a book called
Where Can I Go..
Everything but us.
We were a fact
and not to be embellished on,
or thought about.
Now I remember
you liked brandy
and Bruckner
and
beer,
and painting Mt. Baker
as it sank into the fog.
You liked little boys
and skipping breakfast
(unless we made it ourselves).
In that whole season
as warm day followed warm day
I never thought about
tomorrow or next year.
Of course you never do
when it's happening for you,
and it was happening
for both of us.
When did we stumble,
where did we turn
when did we stop
as though we'd never started?
It was, I think,
somewhere near
September's end.
Other people started
getting in between us,
almost as though
we hadn't locked the gate.
Thinking back now
I may have even come upon
an answer to the why.
Sometimes being happy
seems a self-indulgence.
When on every side of you
the world seems wrapped in wrong,
it becomes a bending burden
to go on smiling
or to smile at all
even for the one you love.
We had friends
who never laughed,
not because there was a war -
there was,
but then there always is.
But fun had lost
a button off its pants,
the first one,
and none of us were making any effort
to sew it on again.
- Selected by
MS |
