April 3rd: Travel

Everyone's posting photos of trips on Facebook, that or road races, and my daughter sent an audio file of herself reciting the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English from memory ("Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.")

Wish I were going somewhere, but I'm not.  Spring Break is a distant memory, and summer is still far off.

Well, here's a poem about travel, anyway.  I shared it in this post in February 2016.

Questions Of Travel 

by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

Here's the rest.

Dori has today's line of the Progressive Poem.