Blog Archives
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
Here, Where the World is Quiet
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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Here, where the world is quiet ;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams ;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
- From “The Garden of Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Hushed October Morning
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost–
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
- “October” by Robert Frost
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
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”
2012 Weekly Challenge: Modern
© 2012 Loren Zemlicka
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For this challenge, I wanted to photograph nature in the style of a “modern” artist. I used Jackson Pollock’s “Gray No. 14″ as inspiration.
“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”
- Jackson Pollock
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"
Fall Above
Canon EOS 5D
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Most Touching of Wounded Objects
Canon EOS 5D
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
“A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful,
so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity,
is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.”
- Edna Ferber
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
