from the weekend couch:

Invictus


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. 


-William Ernest Henley

After all, the princesses in the fairy tales I read as a child must've had other things to do besides waiting for their happy-ever-afters.

Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.


-Rainer Maria Rilke

It's official:

Redemptions

or was the point always
to continue without a sign?
-Louise Gluck, "Matins"

I have all too recently realized my folly of letting things pass under my nose. Without me noticing them, without me giving them notice.

What a terrible, sad way of life it is--to wake up and go through the motions of one's day, to close one's eyes off to slumber without first looking at the stars and wishing on one, just because one has not wished on a star in ages, just because one has forgotten to, or ceased to believe in such things. Things like wishes, and stars, and blessings, and rainbows after rainy days. In even more intangible intangibles, like love, and faith, and hope. In believing that life is good, that there is much to be thankful for, despite and in spite of the daily toils, the unrealized dreams, the occasional hunger, the uninvited sadnesses.

But life doesn't cease to remind. And it has given me constant nudges until I learned to pay attention to things I have unintentionally taken for granted.

That there is a roof over my head, that I have a job that more than gets me through from one pay check to another, that I can buy the things I need and want, that I have a nose that lets me breathe, that there is air to breathe, at all--I am thankful. But more so, for the fact that I have a family who has never, ever abandoned me, come hell or high water, that I have friends who stay with me in good times and in bad, that there is grace that keeps on saving, over and over, and over again--for these I am grateful, happy to be alive.

May you have a blessed year ahead.

from the weekend couch:

from the weekend couch: