Mission:
Change the story.
It’s your time to shine.
Wherever your journey takes you,
We’ll be there.
– CP
The taste of Italy
We are delighted to sit down,
To welcome
The one from Italy,
Constantly evolving with all the local color.
We can
Spice up your mornings,
If you like.
You’ll love a celebration,
Rapido e semplice!
May you never become
A long lost relative.
– Carolina Perrone
Confession
The rose that grew from concrete by Tupac Shakur
Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong it
learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams, it
learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.
It takes imagination
I know now that
It takes imagination
For humankind
To make progress.
Make no small plans.
Act.
CP
I am here
I am here
So deeply engaged
Grateful to stand on this very land
Bold enough
To decide to be here
Instead of traveling familiar
And well worn regions
To study, teach, work,
To
Begin
To
Pay attention.
I am here
CP
The patience of ordinary things by Pat Schneider
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
~ Pat Schneider
We asked the captain by Robert Hass
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it.”
Robert Hass (1979)
How wonderful by Irving Feldman
How wonderful to be understood,
to just sit here while some kind person
relieves you of the awful burden
of having to explain yourself, of having
to find other words to say what you meant,
or what you think you thought you meant,
and of the worse burden of finding no words,
of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person
has found just the right words for you—and you
have only to sit here and be grateful
for words so quiet so discerning they seem
not words but literate light, in which
your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.
How wonderful that is!
And how altogether wonderful it is
not to be understood, not at all, to, well,
just sit here while someone not unkindly
is saying those impossibly wrong things,
or quite possibly they’re the right things
if you are, which you’re not, that someone
—a difference, finally, so indifferent
it would be conceit not to let it pass,
unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.
And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage
of those high murmurings over your head,
having found, after all, you are grateful
—and you understand this, how wonderful!—
that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,
like a root growing wise in darkness
under the light litter, the falling words.
Tidy
