Titles can be so much a part of a poem. I love this from Billy Collins for instance:

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

Those little lines are enjoyable enough. The sound, the image, the simplicity, even the subtle praise of slowness implied, all ring of a Mary Oliver poem. In fact, I can just as easily picture Oliver in place of the tortoise.

But what makes the poem, for me, is the not-so-subtle title Collins gives it:

”My Hero”

There’s a wry smile written across the entire poem (which scrambles the original fable in fun ways) that says My heroes are not the ones that usually go by that name.

Getcha Bean boots on

Kitchen Chalk Talk • “…and this something makes demands on us.”

[W]hile beauty is something whose event can be remarked upon, and in a way that seems to convey a meaning, the word “beauty” indicates nothing: neither exactly a quality, nor a property, nor a function, not even really a subjective reaction to an object or occurrence, it offers no phenomenological purchase upon aesthetic experience. And yet nothing else impresses itself upon our attention with at once so wonderful a power and so evocative an immediacy. Beauty is there, abroad in the order of things, given again and again in a way that defies description and denial with equal impertinence.

~David Bentley Hart~

It snows because the wind wants

to be water, because water

wants to be powder and powder wants

to seduce the eye. Because once in his life

the philosopher has to admit

to the poverty of thought.

Because the rich man cannot buy snow

and the poor man has to wear it on his eyebrows.

    ~Pablo Medina~

“Most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.”

Kitchen Chalk Talk • I think this is a pretty damn good epigraph for this year

Finished reading: The Character of Virtue by Stanley Hauerwas 📚

If I have any advice, it is simply this. Many generous people have made your life possible. Don’t be afraid of imitating them.

A brief New Year’s in-lieu-of-newsletter newsletter — nothing, nothing, nothing will ever be the same…🙂

Tyrannus T. Twostroke • A simple job for a simple engine