Rivka’s Story #30Inks30Days; 26 June, 2020

 

Krishna Jungle Volcano

Rivka’s Story #30Inks30Days; 25 June, 2020

 iroshizuku momiji

Rivka’s Story #30Inks30Days 3 June, 2020

Bungu Box Sweet Potato Yellow

 

The Super Moon of May

I went for a walk last evening (alone, in the almost-dark), out in the park by my house. To the west, there was this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But to the east, the east in the evening, there was this glorious sight:

    It was more coral than my camera would catch. My iPhone was a little better at picking up the tint, but not so good with the details. The moon sifted itself between the scattered clouds,     

 

 

 

 

and silhouetted the branches of trees:

And as I sat by my open window, choosing photos, the horned owl came by to hoo-hoo plaintively in the tree. Shortly thereafter, in response to a siren in the distance, a lone coyote howled in a plangent fashion, and I thought of Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Beasts,” with which I shall leave you:

BEASTS

Beasts in their major freedom
Slumber in peace tonight. The gull on his ledge
Dreams in the guts of himself the moon-plucked waves below,
And the sunfish leans on a stone, slept
By the lyric water,

In which the spotless feet
Of deer make dulcet splashes, and to which
The ripped mouse, safe in the owl’s talon, cries
Concordance. Here there is no such harm
And no such darkness

As the selfsame moon observes
Where, warped in window-glass, it sponsors now
The werewolf’s painful change. Turning his head away
On the sweaty bolster, he tries to remember
The mood of manhood,

But lies at last, as always,
Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,
Hearing with sharper ears the wind’s exciting minors,
The leaves’ panic, and the degradation
Of the heavy streams.

Meantime, at high windows
Far from thicket and pad-fall, suitors of excellence
Sigh and turn from their work to construe again the painful
Beauty of heaven, the lucid moon
And the risen hunter,

Making such dreams for men
As told will break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters.

– RICHARD WILBUR

(https://werewolf-news.com/2009/06/beasts-by-richard-wilbur/)

#30Inks30Days 13 April, 2020

Robert Oster Barossa Grape. I know I can’t do a credible drawing of a person; please feel free to giggle. In fact, I hope you do! We need to keep hold of our sense of the ridiculous.

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

How are people doing? How are you handling isolation? The daily news? The loneliness or the excessive togetherness? Please let me know.

Inktober 2019, Day Twenty-eight: So near and yet…

Inktober Prompt: Ride
Goldspot Prompt: Torture

 

28 October, 2019

Well,

Didn’t you and Dr. Morgan give me a start, sitting by my bed, watching and waiting for me to wake up! Yet how happy I was to see you after all these weeks apart.

You told me so much on the way to your house that all I could do was ride the crest of the information wave that flowed from you. I had no chance to respond before we arrived at yours and I, of course, had to sleep again.

And now that I am awake, I find you where you where you should be ~ at your papa’s side (how glad I am to see him too, though I would he were better). I cannot talk to you freely in front of him, so I pretend to write a letter to my cousin, but I shall leave it on the escritoire for you to read while I sit with your father.

How kind it was of Dr. Torres to stay with your papa so you and Dr. Morgan could fetch me. And how fortunate it was that she found the last page of the Legends book. Now that I’ve read the story through and looked at the unexpected map on the back of that fateful final folio, I wish to talk with you more. Will you, tonight, come sneak into my room, as you did when we were children so we could read under the sheets and giggle and whisper, so that we can puzzle over the chart together? Our two heads will be more effective than the one of your

Fog-brained
Hannah

P.S. It is a small torture to have you so near, yet be unable to speak freely!

The Waiting Time Continues, Plus: The Peach Tree Chronicles, Part IV

It was a great day for photos.  The peach tree continues to blossom, though some of the petals are starting to fall, either from the frost or from the natural progression from flowers to fruit. Time will tell.

And, as if to take advantage of the warm weather between freezes, the daffodils went from a single bud to a bouquet,

the plum tree burst out like fireworks

 

 

(it should be noted that never, and I mean never, have the birds left us a single plum),

the miniature irises went from little city-states to attempted-empire,

 

and the crab-apple in the front yard, one that we did not plant but that decided to grow there anyway, is dotted with tiny red buds.

We had another beautiful sunset,

that was graced with a couple hawks flying home for the night.

 

 

And then, of course, there was the moon:

It’s the largest Super Moon we’ll see this year and it’s called the Pink Moon and here, at least, it was for a while.

It was hard to catch the colour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am oh so grateful for these moments in the evening that provide some distraction and some easing of the sorrow and distress. But part of me wonders how the world can continue to reinvigorate itself so joyously when so many are suffering, dying, and having their lives up-ended temporarily or permanently by COVID-19. The dichotomy reminds of W.H. Auden’s poem, though the careless entities there are mostly human rather than Nature:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(Snagged from http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html. Tgere’s a photo of the Breughel painting there.)

And our waiting continues.

Inktober 2019, Day Twenty-four: An Eerie Coincidence…

Inktober Prompt: Dizzy
GoldspotPrompt: Ghost

24 October, 2019

Bridget,

These coincidences are almost too many to believe, queer and eerie ~ we shall have a neologism: queerie ~ but perhaps that is just how the world works.

Dr. Torres found the volume in a book store ~ I should like to know which one! ~ as she was driving here to open her new practice? Do you believe this account, Bridie? It makes me a little dizzy in those parts of my brain struggling to maintain a link to logic.

And to find out that you, or your family, are part of local legend and you never knew! I was aware that your mother was another Bridget, but, like you, I had no idea that your family always had a Bridie in every generation of the family tree. All this you learnt from the introduction! Do any of the legends in the book hold clues as to what is happening now?

It saddens me that your father is not improving any longer. How often what we see in others reflects back to us; how aching it must be to have your father look through you as if you were a ghost. In my little world, you are the reality that is

Most substantial,
Hannah

The Peach Tree Chronicles

The freezing rain came. It brought frost and snow in its wake. It coated the tree branches,

 

the hyacinths,

   

the miniature lilies and the crocuses.

 

And it showed no mercy to my beloved peach tree.

My only hope is the string of lights my son helped me wind through the tree.

        The rain and snow have let up. Tomorrow will still be cold, but a warming trend is on the way. However, there is more rain in the mid-range forecast, so stay tuned. More peach drama is sure to follow.

#30Inks30Days: 1 April, 2020

 

1 April, 2020

And just in time, for those of us who need something else to do while practicing social distancing, comes another #30Inks30Days! (Thanks to Tom Oddo of Ink Journal for coming up with this challenge.) Here’s my first day’s inking:

Today’s Ink is Robert Oster Australian Opal Grey. It’s very much the colours of the clouds that will bring the rain and snow that will endanger my peach blossoms (see my previous post).