summer shower

Leonard Durso

unexpected
but welcome
a wet head
and shirt
an easy trade
for relief
from heat and sun
and then memory
comes intruding
a summer shower
thousands of years ago
your hair waist length
dripping on my chest
the white of your teeth
the green of your eyes
the touch of a hand
skin on skin
as rain beat down
on a tin roof
a trailer in Ohio
the sound of corn
serenading in the wind
and sleep
when it came
never felt so good
again

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Summer by Georg Trakl

At evening the complaint of the cuckoo
Grows still in the wood.
The grain bends its head deeper,
The red poppy.

Darkening thunder drives
Over the hill.
The old song of the cricket
Dies in the field.

The leaves of the chestnut tree
Stir no more.
Your clothes rustle
On the winding stair.

The candle gleams silently
In the dark room;
A silver hand
Puts the light out;

Windless, starless night.

translated by Robert Bly

“Whenever [the people] grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

another timely quote from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation

Art of Quotation

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

– Abraham Lincoln, president, statesman, political figure


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from Douglas Moore’s The Art of Quotation blog

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines […]

via “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government” — Art of Quotation