Pre-licked? Get the vaccine people!

http://news.yahoo.com/insane-mail-order-chicken-pox-lollipops-craze-053000448.html

We will not be buying Lucy any chicken pox lollipops. Don't be stupid, people.

~Dr. Mom

Lucinda: illuminated

photo by Scott Snyder

Lucinda: illuminated
by Allison Snyder

You are asleep on my chest,
your tiny body laced onto mine.
You are a mysterious traveler from a foreign land.
A halo of fluff covers your head;
in your delicate, lavender eyelids,
I can see the past, the future.
When your eyes open, light shoots through me.

Your heavenly bits are wearing thin, my darling,
now four months in this world.
You stir when a shiver of life runs through you.
You smell more of Dreft than of the ether.
Soon, your otherworldly memories and magic will disappear.
By the time you can speak, you will no longer be able to tell me
where you've been, where you were going.

"I love you!" I whisper urgently:
it's all I can think to say,
yet it encompasses everything.
"You're mine," and immediately
I know you never were,
but what I mean is: You're home now,
and I claim you.

Rockport

Postcard from Rockport
by April Lindner

Cold as a slap, this indigo sea,
where we clamber on blonde-fringed rocks,
where someone's tarted up the fishing shacks
with red paint and artful nets.

The sun floats like ice in a highball.
Condos train their plate-glass gazes
on the horizon, amnesiac
to past conspiracies of cloud,

storms that shook homes and swallowed boats.
Just north, a granite wall's etched with the lost—
decades of their half-remembered names.

Imagine waking always to this spread—
each day the ocean swelling
to loll at your feet, exotic pet.

The galleries glow, ripe with impasto,
sunsets we could be bite into:
raspberries, marzipan, seafoam like cream.

Their artists shoot for the numinous,
overlook the jagged and impermanent:

barnacles overtaking the dock,
clustered mussels, tangled kelp
and the steady lament
of pebbles tugged senseless from shore.

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I am remembering many amazing moments spent at Halibut Point State Park, walking through the brush maze, peering over the crystalline quarry ledge, viewing the stunning ocean with its crashing waves and majestic rock outcroppings. I love this poem.
~Ally

Lucy, Sweet Lucy

(certainly helps to have a world-class photographer as a husband, and a miraculous beauty as a muse...) all photos by Scott Snyder

Today's Inspiring Quote

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do."
~Edward Everett Hale

An Autumn drive for you who are far away...

Barack Obama...by poem

The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems
by Yusef Komunyakaa

Was he looking for St. Lucia's light
to touch his face those first days
in the official November snow & sleet
falling on the granite pose of Lincoln?

If he were searching for property lines
drawn in the blood, or for a hint
of resolve crisscrossing a border,
maybe he'd find clues in the taste of breadfruit.

I could see him stopped there squinting
in crooked light, the haze of Wall Street
touching clouds of double consciousness,
an eye etched into a sign borrowed from Egypt.

If he's looking for tips on basketball,
how to rise up & guard the hoop,
he may glean a few theories about war
but they aren't in The Star-Apple Kingdom.

If he wants to finally master himself,
searching for clues to govern seagulls
in salty air, he'll find henchmen busy with locks
& chains in a ghost schooner's nocturnal calm.

He's reading someone who won't speak
of milk & honey, but of looking ahead
beyond pillars of salt raised in a dream
where fat bulbs split open the earth.

The spine of the manifest was broken,
leaking deeds, songs & testaments.
Justice stood in the shoes of mercy,
& doubt was bandaged up & put to bed.

Now, he looks as if he wants to eat words,
their sweet, intoxicating flavor. Banana leaf
& animal, being & nonbeing. In fact,
craving wisdom, he bites into memory.

The President of the United States of America
thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie
to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus
for its ink, how a man's skin becomes the final page.

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from Poets.org