Poem for Saturday, Maryland Zoo, 'Preemptive Strike'

A Potted Plant
By Hafiz
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

I pull a sun from my coin purse each day.

And at night I let my pet the moon
Run freely into the sky meadow.

If I whistled,
She would turn her head and look at me.

If I then waved my arms,
She would come back wagging a marvelous tail
Of stars.

There are always a few men like me
In this world

Who are house-sitting for God.
We share His royal duties:

I water each day a favorite potted plant
Of His--
This earth.

Ask the Friend for love.
Ask Him again.

For I have learned that every heart will get
What it prays for
Most.

--------

I had a quiet Friday after my eventful Thursday. Mostly I spent far too much time working on an Evil Project for which the blame lies with dementordelta, eating my leftover panang tofu for lunch, and writing a review of "Preemptive Strike", the somewhat disappointing but still enjoyable penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (and the last appearance of the wonderful Ro Laren in a canonical story). I watched a bit of news, since there have been three probable mail bombs in Maryland and DC packages in the past few days, and I read a whole bunch of interviews with Geoffrey Rush, who has belatedly become my imaginary boyfriend (I've adored him for years, I was just never compelled before to go hunting for articles about him).

Daniel's robotics build season starts tomorrow, so he is pleased about that. We had dinner with my parents, then I had a huge urge to watch Die Hard and no one in my family ever objects to watching that, so we put it on and spent and enjoyable couple of hours quoting all the good lines. Older son's robotics season starts tomorrow, so he is pleased about that. Then we put on the end of the Sugar Bowl, about which I didn't care much since I rarely root for either LSU or Texas A&M. I have eggnog, which makes everything better, and I have some more photos from the Maryland Zoo last month, though now that Adam has shown me how to improve animal eyes using Photoshop CS5, I feel like all the eyes in these Elements-cropped photos are failures:















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