Carrasco Studio

Three School Mice

All three of my grandchildren are going to school now.  The hope and terror, the backpacks of books and the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in your lunchbox, the struggles with arithmetic and the playground politics.    Staying after school to help Sister clean the blackboards.........

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/17/09  All blog entries on this site, visual or intellectual, are the property of Jennifer M. Carrasco (unless stated otherwise) and cannot be reproduced or used without her written permission.

Poem for Hard Times

After an evening of depressing news on the TV, money crashing here and there and people shouting "kill the terrorist" when Obama was mentioned at McCain rallys (how crazy are these people!!) I drank three beers and went to bed early.  Now I pay for it...up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 2 am, and worrying in front of the computer.  I ran into a poem I like to read in times of stress.  I'm of a mind that if I take one poem, like aspirin,  I will wake up feeling better in the morning.  Here it is.

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.