February 26, 2023
Lots of cold and snow in the past few weeks in our part of the world, but the changing light makes it pretty clear that winter won’t be with us too much longer.
Going to take a rest tonight and get back to it tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland]
Oh, Glorious natural light. Thank you Buddy and Heather.
February
BY MARGARET ATWOOD
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Thank you, Professor, for the beautiful photo, a reminder that all people on our planet are part of the same environment, same world. When my Father was in Italy in WW2, he and my Mother would gaze at the moon every night, remembering that they were both looking at the same moon. And the sea that lapped the shore in Italy and in California were connected, like every one of us on the planet.
Motto
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht
Rest well.