Bury My Heart

I have fallen in love with American names, 
The sharp names that never get fat, 
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, 
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, 
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons, 
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn, 
There are English counties like hunting-tunes 
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn, 
But I will remember where I was born. 
   

I will remember Carquinez Straits, 
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane, 
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates 
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane. 
I will remember Skunktown Plain. 

I will fall in love with a Salem tree 
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz, 
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea 
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues. 
I am tired of loving a foreign muse. 

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard, 
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast, 
It is a magic ghost you guard 
But I am sick for a newer ghost, 
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post. 

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. 
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. 
You may bury my body in Sussex grass, 
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy. 
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. 
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

~ Stephen Vincent Benét 

 

Shall We Dance?

 In a normal state of mind, you are always thinking a little bit ahead, sometimes quite far ahead, as at the same time you are thinking a little bit in the past, sometimes quite deeply into the past.  But you scarcely notice the present.  It's constantly racing past anyway.  Is it now...or now...or now...or...?

Dancing places you in the moment.  It's the spell of the sensuous.  Neither past nor present exist.  Only now.  Only this instant.  You are intensely aware of yourself at this moment.  You have lost yourself in the eternal present.  

Plus it's fun.

“Dancers are the athletes of God.”
  ― Albert Einstein

A cold earth wanderer

 

She reminds me of me when I was her age, and the people I knew then.

I traveled through a land of men,
A land of men -- and women too --
And heard and saw such dreadful things
As cold earth wanderers never knew.
 ~ William Blake

Guardian Angel, first broadcast by CBS Radio Radio Mystery Theater on July 11, 1978.