Words that stick

Poems are a place to go these days, in ways they weren't just a few months ago; I can rejoice in them and do my sulking there too.

How frequently I think now of Auden--"We must love one another or die"--and the strange encouragement it provides.

And the first three lines of the Jane Kenyon, poem, "The Clothes Pin:

How much better it is

to carry wood to the fire

than to moan about your life.

Graham Greene presents an image in The Power and the Glory (Chapter 4): "It was like hate on a deathbed." Greene's describing the death of an old dog, though I take it to be a human pronouncement, a yearning for a friendlier world.

The days need all the romanticism and reality they can get.