In her comment on yesterday's post,
Knoxville Girl dissed Robert Frost so today, in a demonstration of Astral-American poets' solidarity, Carl Sandberg punished me with this bit of weather. Thanks KG. May
a thousand grackles nest in your eaves.
Readers who were not raised on a diet of American poetry are probably wondering what I'm on about here. An American poet, Robert Frost, wrote a poem about walls, the subject of yesterday's post.MENDING WALLSomething there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
**************Carl Sandberg, another American poet, wrote a poem about fog.FOG The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Today's photo is just to remind my fellow Victorians that today is the day to decide the fate of the Johnson Street Bridge. The photo was taken in September a year ago when an art event to celebrate the bridge was organized by artist Derek Houston and johnsonstreetbridge.org. Lots of meetings and discussions later, today it all comes to a vote on whether to build a new bridge or not.And2more_tonemappedjsb.jpg)
I've been neglecting Victoria's downtown lately because my daily rambles have been taking me down the Westsong Walkway more often. However yesterday was such a beautiful clear, sunny day that I decided to try out a new (used) lens on Johnson Street. Above is lower Johnson Street, part of what is called "Old Town" because it is the area near Fort Victoria that was earliest settled. Most of this area was built in the 1860s.
digital single lens reflex. It uses any of the Sony lenses and, since Sony bought Minolta, it will also accept any of the Minolta AF lenses or third party manufacturer lenses made for Minoltas. I also have an adapter that enables my camera to accept any lenses with M42 mounts - widely used, especially for Pentax film cameras. There are several advantages to using legacy lenses. They are often very well made lenses using high quality glass. They are now much reduced in price because the cameras for which they were originally made are no longer in use. An added advantage of Sony DSLR cameras is that the image stabilization mechanism is in the camera body rather than in the lenses as with Nikon and Canon cameras. This means one can use older lenses and still have the benefits of modern image stabilization (anti-shake) technology.
Here's a shot I took a few hours ago from the top of the Yates Street Parkade, with some of the Yates Street heritage buildings in the foreground. That's the Johnson Street Bridge on the left and further up the Gorge is the Bay Street Bridge.
