I can see it there …
Just beyond the bus door …
Just down the bus stairs …
After just one stop more …
Hissing brakes
Lurching stop
Squeaky hinges
I stand at the top …
Then step step step, down I go,
When feet hit street it’s begun:
The summer, sweet summer, there it is, right there,
Just beyond the bus door, all that fun.
If life were like a grotto
There would be no score
If the lighter of a candle
Had been rich or a poor
Or boy or girl
Or black or white
Or young or old
Or left or right
Or what had brought’em there
Or how many lights they’d lit
Or if they liked to stand in back
Or kneel alone or sit
No one keeps track of how to spell
The candle lighters’ names
At a grotto time is better spent
Reflecting on their flames
And when the spirit moves,
Passing the light along,
With no thought that the candle
You’re sharing from is wrong
If life were like a grotto
Every light that we discover
Would warm and guide and give itself
To freely spark another.
UPDATED 3-26-16: To read this poem as a STELLER STORY, click on the photo below.
Last year’s Easter egg hunt
was in the old cornfield.
Now it seems that day
not every egg was revealed
and that from those left back
are this year being born
acres and acres of stalks
sprouting tiny eggcorns.
Nature’s packaged each one
in a shell in a husk,
so cracking the eggcorns
is a rusty padlock fuss.
But once their outer layers
are opened up and clean
the cob yolks deep inside
are like nothing that you’ve seen:
Purple, pink, and yellow,
orange, blue, and jade,
all the prettiest pastels,
every springtime shade.
Just how nature made this magic
Science is still figuring,
but one thing learned so far:
is mighty omelets
from the tiny eggcorns spring.
Eggcorns are the kernel of a colorful Easter breakfast. (Photo: PaC)
The Clement Clark Moore standard meets, you guessed it, Norman the Great. Pickle lovers will recognize traces of their favorite brand in the seal at center.
This was the first year I sidestepped scissors, stamps, and the sweet smell of xerox fumes, producing an all digital card out of a table design, photo, and email blast that went out on The Night Before. (Photo: PaC)
(Drawing: PaC)
The assist on the 2010 card goes to Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up author J.M. Barrie, who is credited with the quotation featured on the front.
