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Barn Quilt
Several groups around the state of Wisconsin have been involved with barn quilt projects. The quilt blocks are aimed at increasing tourism in rural areas of the state.
This exerpt from the Green County Barn Quilts website:
“Quilts, always a beloved symbol of comfort, family, heritage and community will provide a warm invitation to the rural countryside of Green County. Vibrant quilt patterns will be painted on pre-built 8’x8’ wooden squares. Each quilt will be painted by a team of volunteers and will require a willing barn owner to donate hanging space on their building. Making these quilt squares will allow volunteer groups from churches, schools, 4-H, scouting, HCE, and other community service groups and even families the opportunity to create and paint their own quilt square as a group project. The square that is chosen may represent a family pattern from a beloved quilt or perhaps a new favorite.”
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© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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A Hole in the Sky
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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I’m looking through a hole in the sky
I’m seeing nowhere through the eyes of a lie
I’m getting closer to the end of the line
I’m living easy where the sun doesn’t shine
I’m living in a room without any view
I’m living free because the rent’s never due
The synonyms of all the things that I’ve said
Are just the riddles that are built in my head
Hole in the sky, take me to heaven
Window in time, through it I fly
- From “Hole in the Sky” by Black Sabbath
Sacred Charm
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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The dear old farm has a sacred charm
That extends to farthest bound,
Every rock and tree is dear to me,
And hallowed seems the ground.
Its beautiful stream whose waters gleam
As they dance on to the sea,
Sings sweeter song, as it moves along,
Than other waters to me.
No leaves are so green, as those that screen
The revered old farm-house doors,
From the burning sun of torrid June
When his fiercest rays he pours.
Each grove and field doth a mem’ry yield
Of dear childhood’s blissful hours,
And in accents clear, voices I hear
That have now augmented powers.
My father’s care and my mother’s prayer
Are now ended here on earth,
But as time rolls on, since they have gone,
I shall understand their worth.
There’s a sacred charm in the dear old farm,
For loved ones have trod its soil,
And much I now see, appears to me
As fruit of their faithful toil.
- “Old Farm” by Jared Barhite
Gone, Gone Again
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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Gone, gone again,
May, June, July,
And August gone,
Again gone by,
Not memorable
Save that I saw them go,
As past the empty quays
The rivers flow.
And now again,
In the harvest rain,
The Blenheim oranges
Fall grubby from the trees
As when I was young
And when the lost one was here
And when the war began
To turn young men to dung.
Look at the old house,
Outmoded, dignified,
Dark and untenanted,
With grass growing instead
Of the footsteps of life,
The friendliness, the strife;
In its beds have lain
Youth. love, age, and pain:
I am something like that;
Only I am not dead,
Still breathing and interested
In the house that is not dark:–
I am something like that:
Not one pane to reflect the sun,
For the schoolboys to throw at–
They have broken every one.
- “Gone, Gone Again” by Edward Thomas
Abandoned Barns Defend Abandoned Men
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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Nature remains faithful by natural light, only.
Immeasurable, invisible in the wind.
Visible when blades and branches bend.
The wind speaks fluent rain.
Despite it the rain falls straight.
And beyond it abandoned barns defend abandoned men.
- Prayer’s End by Brooklyn Copeland
A Thousand Ways to Turn and Only One Direction to Go
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.
From a distance some appeared to be smoldering
But when I approached with my hat in my hands
They let out small puffs of smoke and expired.
Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up
With the otherworldly glow of TV
And these were smoking a little bit too.
I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece.
I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis
And conjured dusky columns in the clouds.
I watched waves lap the crumbling coast.
I heard wind strip the woods.
I saw the last living snow leopard
Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me
That nothing worth doing is worth doing
For the sake of experience alone.
I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time.
The sun came out. It was the old sun
With only a few billion years left to shine.
- Suzanne Buffman, “The New Experience”
Grieve Not
Via Flickr:
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
Grieve not that winter masks the yet quick earth,
Nor still that summer walks the hills no more;
That fickle spring has doffed the plaid she wore
To swathe herself in napkins till rebirth.
These buddings, flowerings, are nothing worth;
This ermine cloud stretched firm across the lakes
Will presently be shattered into flakes;
Then, starveling world, be subject to my mirth.
I know that faithful swift mortality
Subscribes to nothing longer than a day;
All beauty signals imminent decay;
And painted wreckage cumbers land and sea.
I laugh to hear a sniveling wise one say,
“Some winnowed self escapes this reckless way.”
- Walter Clyde Curry, "Grieve Not"
Any Road Will Get You There
Canon EOS 5D
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
- Lewis Carroll
Fixed as a Fencepost
Canon EOS 5D
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.
Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.
And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.
Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.
The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.
Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.
You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,
Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.
- “Becoming a Redwood” by Dana Gioia
