Thank you entry 2/15/23

So... February 15, the day after valentine's day, I received so many gifts from faithful attendees of O Pen. You have it all wrong-- YOU are the ones who make it all work.  I just provide the poems.  Moderate and appreciate the wonderful diversity of voices in those present.

My most special friends!

I am touched to the quick by each one of your heartfelt notes!  It is I who thanks YOU.  

Here’s to another terrific year of sharing!  

Mirror mirror on the wall

tell each O pen-er the call

that they are essential to all!

The Wednesday share of humor, thoughts, emotions

provides such a welcome diversity, a perfect ocean

crew to help navigate paradox, enigma, and all

that calls between the lines with or without a squall.

You are each inscribed in indelible ink. Please accept one group note for providing me such

ASTHORE !!!!  (Paul tells me this means “Treasure”.)

He hastens to add, this means "heart's treasure.......Money is ok, too...used to be punts and pingins, now Euro and Cent ( not euros and cents).....harrrumph!  

I am SO touched by the song and the hearts… it’s only right to send a valentine poem back.

However we all feel about poetry, what is so special is the weekly sharing which uplifts our hearts!  thank you all! 

Love Column, Take 5

 

Before you start with how,

what it is to be 

examine to and in as added pow

shaken or ground, to how to be

in love:

 

review Will's sonnet on steady,

unshaken, fixed star variety,

not to mention varieties ready

(one for each weekday). Satiety

BTW, not part of the deal, in love.

 

Understand the arrows of Eros,

layers of friendly, protective,

selfless, playful, even the terrors

of unrequited (immediately rejected)

in any committed love.

 

How to be human without it,

how to be in it with heart?

Time may turn love on a spit,

but who takes the leading part?

Love.

 

(that each one of you shares so generously each week!)

Thank you!

**

And what does Paul say? I like that Eros and Terror connection. One can lead to the other, so I'm told. And that rascal, Eros, is a Roman Cupid, a putto . Isn't that a great word, putto ?  Almost a Yiddish putz.

-- and just in case Judith is around you will have an entire encyclopedia about Putto in art... I sent her a cartoon about two Valentine Putto to which she said: The little putto left out “basically”….did you ever notice how BORED the putti in that damn syrupy Sistine Madonna look?  There are some paintings by Rafael that are, you should excuse, rather vapid…On the other hand, the putti in a painting in the Louvre by I forget who look downright apprehensive—they are the ones watching the nice old mohel in a Circumcision of Jesus…

So I looked up this :  https://useum.org/artwork/Circumcision-Giulio-Romano-1525 but that wasn't it.

her reply:  

Oh NO that is grandiose and slithery and after Rafael but looking more like a bad Venetian—look at that damned twisty column and all those robes blowing artistically around (like those singers and dancers—male—who have “I do good cape” on their resumes) and the lovely wenches side-eying the watchers.  No no no!  The mohel LOOKED like a mohel, a nice grandfatherly type.  It was a domestic painting.  I saw it on my first trip to the Louvre in the year ‘3, in that long hall on the way to that boring female with no eyebrows that we are supposed to go all ga-ga over.