Heartland

See the sun rise over her skin.
Dawn changes everything...
Everything.
And the delta sun
Burns bright and violet.

Mississippi and the cotton wool heat.
66 -- a highway speaks
Of deserts dry,
Of cool green valleys,
Gold and silver veins
Of the shining cities.

In this heartland...
In this heartland soil.

See the sun rise over her skin,
She feels like water in my hand.
Freeway like a river cuts through this land
Into the side of love
Like a burning spear.

And the poison rain
Brings a flood of fear
Through the ghost ranch hills.
Death valley waters
In the towers of steel.
Belief goes on and on.

-- Bono (U2) 1988

destiny

veins are shaped like lightning,
like the roots of a tree,
and like rivers that flow down to the sea.
-- melissa swingle (trailer bride) 2003

Lazy Afternoon

It's a lazy afternoon
And the beetle bugs are zooming
And the tulip trees are blooming
And there's not another human in view
But us two

It's a lazy afternoon
And the farmer leaves his reaping
And the meadow cows are sleeping
And the speckled trout stop leaping upstream
As we dream

A far pink cloud hangs over the hill
Unfolding like a rose
If you hold my hand and sit real still
You can hear the grass as it grows

It's a hazy afternoon
And I know a place that's quiet
Except for daisies running riot
And there's no one passing by it to see
Come spend this lazy afternoon with me

-- John Latouche / Jerome Moross (1954)

Circles

from Essays: First Series
Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

ESSAY X _Circles
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world....
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens....
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees....

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)