checking it often, if ever. It has been very nice knowing
all of you.
I'll leave the poems and lagniappe up for people to enjoy:
Landfall
Blackness rules the sky
broken by one billion pinpoints of light
It has been three weeks since we last saw land
The old bosun swears that he can smell land from a day away
Just as he's said for the last three days
I stare ahead with that long gaze
that every sailor gets when he has been too long at sea
or too many weeks ashore
Wanting to see the fires of home
Wanting, but not hoping
I have always felt that we persevere on this heading
with no real destination in mind
When a sharp turn to the left might mean rougher sailing
But a faster landfall
And the reward of far better company than I have known
Still we press on through the miserable comfort
of endless complacency
This course will bring no triumphant homecoming
I have sailed this way more times than I care to recall
And nothing about it is really different at all
I seem to remember a better day
oh
well
It was there just a moment ago
The flicker of movement from the corner of my eye
When I turned to look directly upon it
It had fled
The horrid burn of my discontent is upon me
I look about me and see only walking dead
And feel a weary loneliness
that sleep will not allay
Perhaps the helmsman will not see the reflection
of the compass light upon my tears
I can not remember the last time my grief found release
My heart has been numb for so long
Kept safe until such a time as it might be needed
Some times
I guess
A man must stand watch alone in silence
Kept company only by the dead
And the unending heave of crest and trough
Parting is not sweet sorrow
But rather aching hollowness
Soon I will tire of this journey
Even now my thousand league stare
is drawn impatiently south
Only a few more hundred miles remain
Then I will whisper "hard to port"
to my sleeping helmsman now awake
It is not a choice to be made
It is the final step that I must take
With those words I will begin anew
With those words I will at last come home
-Michael Chiara
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One of my Favorites, but not one I wrote:
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost
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My favorite movie quote of all time:
Mitch Taylor: Something strange happened to me this morning. Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in
sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked
women screaming and throwing little pickles at you? Mitch Taylor: No. Chris Knight: Why am I the only person that has that dream?
--Real Genius, 1985 ---------------------------------------
Refuge in the storm
Outside the wind howls with indignation
And hurls its tears of rage upon my small accommodation
Inside, I am safe from its impersonal ire
I am kept warm by my little crackling fire
And yet here I suffer life's slings and arrows
Safe from the storm, safe within my sorrows
Outside my tiny ship of self would toss from crest to crest
While the waves would hulk and shriek and rise and beat their mighty breasts
Still.. I will take refuge in the storm
In the morning I will watch the world transform
With open arms and joyful smile
And weep for the others who all the while
Were safe within their little houses
Living their lives like meek little mouses
-Michael Chiara
12 August 2005
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