Let It Be...

in

"Introduction To Poetry" I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

~ Billy Collins

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The History Teacher

in

Trying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions such as "How far is it from here to Madrid?" "What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden, and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom for the playground to torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home past flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiers in the Boer War told long, rambling stories designed to make the enemy nod off.

~ Billy Collins

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Like The Sun

in

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race… there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” ~ Thomas Merton

"It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine."

~ Billy Collins

Bishes...

That you shine...

Not because you can, but because YOU DO.

************** (Thank you, sista Suebob, for that FANTASTIC Thomas Merton contribution!) (source of photo) ************************************