Tidbits

 Annamaria on Monday

A lot is going on in my life, and I have many topics I might take up today, but I can't seem to get more than than half way through any topic I might write about.  The best I am capable of is a few peeks into what has been on my mind.

I've being doing the happy dance about the latest news from my favorite charity, the Sidai Resource Centre.  Eight of the Sidai girls are now in secondary school, an opportunity most girls in their culture can only dream of.  Here are six who are all now at the same boarding school:

  

In another part of my mental forrest, I have been binge watching the films of Stanley Kubrick. Last night's flick was the great Paths of Glory, which came with a bonus interview with the movie's star, Kirk Douglas.  In it, the interviewer referred to Douglas's childhood poverty and asked "Would you want to make a movie about your life?"  Right off the cuff, Kirk answered:

Not just a pretty face!

If you want to tell the truth, you write a novel.

If you really want to lie, you write a biography.

Topic 3: My efforts to rescue the rights to my own work have been taking up a LOT of my time and though I am seeing some progress, I still have not arrived at that magic moment when my back list can be published, and my new work can launch. The process is frustrating and daunting, but I am still determined.  I hope I will have good news about that one of these days.

WNYC, my local and addictive public radio station celebrates April as poetry month.  They typically invite listeners to submit a personal poem on a given topic.  This year they asked for poems - one to be aired each morning - on the subject of consequences.  I decided to try one on unintended consequences, a subject I have written about here, as have some of my blogmates, most notably here and here.  I took a stab at writing such a topic in verse, but given the many drains on my time and energy, as soon as I had something even passable, I decided to stop and submit it as it was.  I then wasted fifteen or twenty minutes trying to find the instructions on how to submit.  I despaired of that, but today I screw up my courage and offer it here:

You prayed for rain 

and made a hurricane.

Be careful what you summon.

 What is coming may be grief, not relief.

By way of compensation for that little ditty, I offer a song guaranteed to lift your spirits.  I am working on this post on Friday this week because this past Sunday (yesterday by the time you read this) was Easter, and that means that I will have spent this Sunday with my family.  "Alleluia" was a word I sang on Easter as a child in the church choir.  Today I offer you a Hallelulia song of an entirely different sort: by two of the greatest geniuses of American music.  Can you listen to this and sit still?  I can't.