for a good time

Here's a thought for you: two apes (with no tails) looking at the earth's magnificence in a tiny box. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Yes, Abbie and I have been enjoying the Planet Earth series. Abbie closes her eyes when the predators get close. We both laugh out loud at the sheer majesty of the images. And you just can't help thinking - we are part of this, and yet so not a part of it. I will never see a snow leopard in the wild. So, it's wonderful and mind-expanding. And at the same time it's also just more TV, and it's more of sitting in a room looking at a little screen. As I am still doing. As you are doing.

Well, at least here's a poem for you! The best I can offer.



Forgive My Guilt


Not always sure what things called sins may be,
I am sure of one sin I have done.
It was years ago, and I was a boy,
I lay in the frostflowers with a gun,
The air ran blue as the flowers, I held my breath,
Two birds on golden legs slim as dream things
Ran like quicksilver on the golden sand,
My gun went off, they ran with broken wings
Into the sea, I ran to fetch them in,
But they swam with their heads high out to sea,
They cried like two sorrowful high flutes,
With jagged ivory bones where wings should be.

For days I heard them when I walked that headland
Crying out to their kind in the blue,
The other plovers were going over south
On silver wings leaving these broken two.
The cries went out one day; but I still hear them
Over all the sounds of sorrow in war or peace
I ever have heard, time cannot drown them,
Those slender flutes of sorrow never cease.
Two airy things forever denied the air!
I never knew how their lives at last were spilt,
But I have hoped for years all that is wild,
Airy, and beautiful will forgive my guilt.


Robert P. Tristram Coffin