"Nothing Is Too Small ..." - by Mary Oliver

 

Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About
- by Mary Oliver - *

Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About
The cricket doesn't wonder
     if there's a heaven
or, if there is, if there's room for him.
It's fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If we can, he enters a house
     through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
     Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don't know what.
     But certainly it doesn't mean
he hasn't been an excellent cricket
     all his life.

 -------------------------------------------------
   *[ Mary Oliver, from her collection Felicity ]

Bernie bitch-slaps Wall Street's thugs! - by TPO

 Bernie bitch-slaps Wall Street's thugs !

 - by TPO -

Recently, Wall Street's shakers and movers had the premeditated gall to  lecture Americans to “act on the deficit and reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”   The following is Senator Bernie Sanders' response =======>

<<  There really is no shame. The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.

Our Wall Street friends might also want to show some courage of their own by suggesting that the wealthiest people in this country, like them, start paying their fair share of taxes. They might work to end the outrageous corporate loopholes, tax havens and outsourcing provisions that their lobbyists have littered throughout the tax code – contributing greatly to our deficit.

Many of the CEO’s who signed the deficit-reduction letter run corporations that evaded at least $34.5 billion in taxes by setting up more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens since 2008. As a result, at least a dozen of the companies avoided paying any federal income taxes in recent years, and even received more than $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS since 2008.

Several of the companies received a total taxpayer bailout of more than $2.5 trillion from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Many of the companies also have outsourced hundreds of thousands of American jobs to China and other low wage countries, forcing their workers to receive unemployment insurance and other federal benefits. In other words, these are some of the same people who have significantly caused the deficit to  explode over the last four years. >>

 

"Variations on a theme of Paganini" - by Sergei Rachmaninoff

"Variations on a theme of Paganini" 

- by Sergei Rachmaninoff -

"Lesson" - by Forrest Hamer

 

"Lesson" *
by Forrest Hamer ==== /// ====

It was 1963 or 4, summer,
and my father was driving our family
from Ft. Hood to North Carolina in our 56 Buick.
We'd been hearing about Klan attacks, and we knew

Mississippi to be more dangerous than usual.
Dark lay hanging from the trees the way moss did,
and when it moaned light against the windows 
that night, my father pulled off the road to sleep.

Noises
that usually woke me from rest afraid of monsters 
kept my father awake that night, too, 
and I lay in the quiet noticing him listen, learning
that he might not be able always to protect us

from everything and the creatures besides;
perhaps not even from the fury suddenly loud
through my body about his trip from Texas
to settle us home before he would go away

to a place no place in the world
he named Viet Nam. A boy needs a father
with him, I kept thinking, fixed against noise
from the dark.

________________________________________

* Copyright 1995 by Forrest Hamer