Dec 10
Double figures already?!
Welcome to the lightening round of Chorister at Home, where a conspiracy of TTC train delays, dancing and walking home (see above re TTC delays) forced us to make our tea and drink it while searching for poetry.
The tea today is Turmeric Spiced Herbal. Moving swiftly on to other news…Well, okay. It’s not that quite rapid-fire a post. Here’s the thing: We were going to find you a poem about dancing, because also see above re dancing. We had an excellent teacher in tonight briefing us, and she had some fabulous selections including easy Lea Rigg and the trickier Smiling Lila. All Greek to you, I know.
[Stopping to note; If anyone reading does also dance Scottish, say so! We’d love to know!]
The thing about the Tuesday Grannies is that they are the loveliest women ever, and they’re very keen on their tea. But we did get lots of dancing in, because today’s effusive teacher is nothing if not effusive and efficient, but anyway. Turns out unless you like Emily Dickenson (she drives us batty), there’s just nothing good and readily available about dancing. Okay. Nothing good and new. We’ve given you all the best Pat Batt RSCDS poems over the last however many years. So no dancing poems. Look, we just can’t inflict Dickenson on you. Or us. We have limits.
So have this, instead. Bet you know it.
The Summer Day
May Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The tea? We told you, Turmeric. Plenty of heat to it, and we don’t mean the water temperature. On a bitterly cold day (not this one, then) or if you’ve got a head cold (we do not) it’s probably perfect. For any other occasion…Well, it tastes the way you imagine a cold cure would taste. It’s perfectly serviceable. It’s just not what we necessarily go to tea for. And that’s okay. You can’t win every calendar door. Especially not when you pull the tea out of the calendar at random.
Until tomorrow, when we will also have been dancing. But at least we’ll know better than to try and be topical about it.
