Sing Robin Sing

To honor our burgeoning spring and an unknown artist, one of my all-time favorite folk art textiles. This pillowcase is hand-embroidered with a scene of two brown women and a baby, relaxing by a stream bordered with cattails and flowers. Over their heads, two giant blue jays engage as they bend the branches of red-flowering trees. The maker stitched in a lovely poem:

A kind heart are the gardens
A kind thoughts are the roots

A kind words are the blossoms
And a kind deeds are the fruits

Sing Robin Sing

Der Panther

While I'm on this big cat poetry jag, here's one more personal favorite, Der Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke. I looked for and found several pictures to go with this post, but somehow they seem to disrespect the poem. There are a number of fine translations, each having its merits, but I'm going with this one today.

The Panther

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound . . . then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

translation by Robert Bly