"Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost" Ralph Waldo Emerson
To Stay Awake Is To Stay Alive
"Rattle Snakes and Rose Petals"
Which oblivion holds more risk, what matters most?
To miss the beauty or to step toward the poison?
A liquid nectar,
A distillate drop,
dangling like a prism
on a razor
tip.
A fang or a thorn. A rattlesnake or a rose.
All is One. Each the Whole.
Wait. Scratch that. Too Emersonian? Slightly out of touch?
This I know—Beauty can be just as penetrating and painful as poison. And poison, I hear, elementally may be both toxin and tonic.
So still again and evermore. A rattlesnake, a rose.
To stay awake is to stay alive.
a poem by Kevin Hall, 2017
"You used to say the highway was your home . . ."
"Fort Worth Blues"--Steve Earl lyrics in honor of 20th century bard Townes Van Zandt
In Ft. Worth all the neon's burnin' bright
Pretty lights, red and blue
But they'd shut down all the honky tonks tonight
Say a prayer or two
If they only knew
You used to say the highway was your home
But we both know, that ain't true
It's just the only place a man can go
When he don't know, where he's travelin' to
But Colorado's always clean and healin'
And Tennessee in spring is green and cool
It never really was your kind of town
But you went around, with the Ft. Worth blues
Somewhere up beyond the great divide
Where the sky is wide and the clouds are few
A man can see his way clear to the light
Just hold on tight
That's all you gotta do
And they say Texas weather's always changin'
And one thing change'll bring is somethin' new
And Houston really ain't that bad a town
So you hang around with the Ft. Worth blues
There's a full moon over Galway Bay tonight
Silver light, over green and blue
And every place I travel through I find
Some kinda sign, that you've been through
But Amsterdam was always good for grieving
And London never fails to leave me blue
And Paris never was my kinda town
So I walked around with the Ft. Worth blues
(To hear Earle's rendition of this song, check out "Music Corner" at Belated Bard)
'tis not in death that men die most
from Aurora Leigh, Book III, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
For 'tis not in death that men die most,
And, after our first girding of the loins
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery
To run up hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.
Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross. God set our feet low and our forehead high,
And show how a man was made to walk!
