Monday Morning Musings:
Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden – in all the places.”
–Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
“When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”
–Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
I dream about time
and death
and mothers mad with a thousand aches
whose cries shatter the skies
like glass
yet never disturb the shadow figures
or the thunder clouds of war and destruction.
The manufacturers of death never go out of business
and the rain only washes the surface blood away
We go searching for magic
in the break between storms
when the sky is blue
May in Old City Philadelphia
and the world around us is green
on what were abandoned lots
filled with trash,
we find magic, human made
from glass and stone,
Philadelphia Magic Gardens
sparkling, glittering, honed
with skill, passion, artistic vision–
whimsy combined with social justice
and a creative spirit
We walk down South Street
(“Where do all the hippies meet?”)
“You must know where all the bodies are buried,”
says one man to another at a café table.
He agrees he does,
and while I want to know more,
we keep walking, till
a police officer stops us,
on the sidewalk,
not to ask us about bodies,
but instead, to talk up a restaurant,
“They make the best gyros, full of meat.
I eat there all the time.”
Do we look hungry, I wonder?
We thank him,
keep walking,
observing magic all around,
sometimes you just have to look up.
South Street
We wander through shady green–
Hoping these souls are at rest—
and seeing magic all around us,
in the sparrows flitting and chirping in the bushes
and in the flowers glowing in the sunlight.
Christ Church Garden, Philadelphia
In between storms,
when lightning flashes
and rain, first pounds
then tinkles delicately—
like glass chimes–
we look for Earth’s magic
reborn
in plants and vegetables,
strawberries,
tasting of sunlight and summer heat
And so, we recall,
that life is luscious still
look through glass darkly
see what is half empty,
half full,
mend the broken shatters
into a thing of beauty.
And on this cloudy day
while people mourn and celebrate
the fragility of life
I will think of magic,
baking a pie that tastes
of sunlight and summer heat
and life, tart and sweet.
Today is Memorial Day in the U.S.
We visited Philadelphia Magic Gardens a few days ago and then walked around Old City.
We went to Joan’s Farm Stand, in Mickleton, NJ.
Yesterday and today: Merril's historical musings 