A Tidings of Magpies

Thanks by WS Merwin, 1927 Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water looking out in different directions. back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you looking up from tables we are saying thank you in a culture up to its chin in shame living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the back door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks that use us we are saying thank you with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you wi...

Homecoming by Blas Falconer Rain against the roof sounds like a slow tire over gravel, as if a friend has come. The train rumbles through the dark, and my body, tuned to hear you cry before you cry, stirs. The lamp floats in the window, the only window lit at this late hour on the empty street. Your hands unfurl as you fall asleep. Small Clock of Needs, Law that I Abide, the leaves gloss and shine. Like this we rock and sink into the long night of our rocking.

(We saw a flock of birds looking very similiar to this--wild turkeys--after dinner at Grandma PatPat's) Turkeys by Mary Mackey One November a week before Thanksgiving the Ohio river froze and my great uncles put on their coats and drove the turkeys across the ice to Rosiclare where they sold them for enough to buy my grandmother a Christmas doll with blue china eyes I like to think of the sound of two hundred turkey feet running across to Illinois on their way to the platter the scrape of their nails and my great uncles in their homespun leggings calling out gee and haw and git to them as if they were mules I like to think of the Ohio at that moment the clear cold sky the green river sleeping under the ice before the land got stripped and the farm got sold and the water turned the color of whiskey and all the uncles lay down and never got up again please note: photo by Mark Hamilton

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you," that would suffice. --Meister Eckhart

Must have been a slow news day in CinCity today, verrrrry slow since they actually came to interview us this afternoon. If you happen to watch the video I'm in the background--the woman in red. Red scrubs before I got peed on and changed. Hey, just one of those days :>) Working on Thanksgiving? Who's complaining?

by Anne Porter Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing, Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches, Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun, Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry living wild on the Streets through generations of children. Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning, Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh Of the wind in the pinewoods, At night give praise with starry silences. Give praise with the skirling of seagulls And the rattle and flap of sails And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. Give praise with the humpback whales, Huge in the ocean they sing to one another. Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and...

...happy, happy.

"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough." Eckhart, Meister please note: photo from a very interesting blog, Arch At Rang . Try it, you'll like it:>)

Optimism by Jane Hirshfield More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth. I'm about ready to swab the inside of a turkey with orange rinds and coat the rest with butter before turning on the oven to 360 degrees, waiting for the smells of Thanksgiving to fill the air of the kitchen down the steps to the front hallway. CollegeGrrrl will be home this evening. HoneyHaired Grrrl is off school and Hubby is working a four hour shift this morning. Someone will root through the attic and dust off one board game or another--Clue, Battleship, Barbie Dating Game for a little rough and tumble before we eat. The boxer already sprawls unmoveable on the floor in front o...