For the past month there has not been a newspaper, radio station, or television station in this great land of saints and scholars that refrained from employing the cringe-making wheeze, “School is gearing up.” No, school is not gearing up. It has never geared up. It will never gear up, except maybe in Cousin Les’ auto shop class.
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Why are there now so many books of lists of ten things we must do before we die? Why not nine, or eleven? And why should pay someone for a list of experiences he says you and I must fulfill before we shuffle off what Shakespeare is pleased to call this mortal coil?
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Addict homeless person prostitute you guys
Rule of thumb picnic wife-beater trigger
Warning disabled victim survivor
Lame freshman spirit animal insane
That jellyfish gathering is no mystery
Like everyone they want to go to the beach
To play in the water, soak up some rays
Picnic, show off, buy some souvenir mugs
Only there is no coffee after Mass
No cookies or Kool-Aid for the kidlets
The parish hall has been locked up for months
And you know, there’s just something wrong with that
“The Oasis Within” can be read solely as a story, and it would be both diverting and useful, but the thinking reader will also consider the many questions about the meanings in one’s life and the nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
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Do you remember lying on the grassy bank
On a summer afternoon, holding very still…
A curious fact about Midsummer is that it does not fall in the middle of our calendar summer. However, Midsummer does fall in the middle of true summer, around the time of the solstice and of St. John’s Day. In the context of trees and grasses and flowers and agriculture, summer began months ago and is now at its peak, now declining with the sun towards Michaelmas and autumn.
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Like a 16-year-old crossing a field at noon
A little word has a lot of ground to cover in the heat
A mile of open ground to a wall and some trees
Where confusion does not want it to arrive
One of the merry mysteries of midsummer
Is that midsummer isn’t midsummer at all
Maybe it was, back in the shadows of time
When Tolkien’s fairies blessed a happier world
Have you noticed that despite all speakers’ efforts, graduation speeches sound very much alike? “Keep the torch alive to pass to a new generation with the key that unlocks the road to the future…”
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My father beached at Normandy on the second day
(He was okay with having missed the first)
From there through France to Belgium in the mud
For a bloody Christmas in the icy Bulge
Memorial Day is when we remember our friends
As they were…
If today you find yourself in the company of Texas Rangers, no matter who you are, you know that truth and justice will prevail. But it was not always so, and that is the thesis of Doug J. Swanson’s disturbing but well-documented book, Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.
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He found his DaddyPaw’s young adulthood
In a box of letters from New Mexico
About fighting forest fires and building fence
To the stockyards at Magdalena
You still approach the Altar as a child
As you once were, and are, and will be forever
For God will have it so, will have you so –
Enchanted by His magic – a little boy
Whenever I take my book to the front-yard oak
The squirrel stretched from the feeder to the trunk
Flees in a seed-strewn panic across the lawn
To a farther tree, free of human menace
Infections are up and deaths are ‘way down
Or is it that infections are down and deaths are up?
Schools must be closed and the restaurants open
Or schools must be open and restaurants closed…
Police chiefs are costumed as admirals these days
Or as generals, with medals and eagles and stars
Peaked caps and polished boots, more Patton than Patton
In stern command of parking-lot plywood lecterns
The morning was fresh and cool and damp and still
I wheeled the tiller into the garden patch
Fresh gasoline, then primed the little bulb
And turned the red plastic lever just so
LogoSophia Magazine 