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.
The Bay Street Bridge (center of the photo in the distance) marks the northern end of the Upper Harbour. It crosses the Gorge at Point Ellice where the Point Ellice Bridge used to cross. (Scroll down to see yesterday's post). The southern boundary of the Upper Harbour is the Johnson Street Bridge, visible below. The Johnson Street Bridge is slated for replacement over the next couple of years. The railway span is now permanently in the up position since it is no longer functional. The tables and umbrellas visible in the photo below belong the the Canoe Brewpub.
As you can see in both these photos, while autumn is definitely here we are having some beautiful bright sunny days lately.
