January 1939

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer
The supper and knives of a mood.
In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year
That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,
An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,
Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,
Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair
In a wind that plucked a goose,
Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,
Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.
Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,
That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea
Secretly in statuary,
Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,
Not spin to stare at an old year
Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries
Like the mauled pictures of boys?
The salt person and blasted place
I furnish with the meat of a fable.
If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble
An upright man in the antipodes
Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:
Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

- Dylan Thomas
(P.S. I wanted to post this one because though I rarely understand Thomas, I always enjoy him.)

We've been enjoying the poems posted by Ms. Krut - we hope you are enjoying them as well.

Some exciting news for The Bishop's School Library:

We have successfully requested our first inter-library loan! Now students and faculty as well as staff can request to borrow books from other libraries if we do not happen to own the item already. This increases our access to library materials to somewhere in to the millions. Please see Mrs. Brandt in the library if you are interested in borrowing a book on ILL (inter-library loan).

We have added several new DVDs to the catalog recently. If you search The Bishop's School catalog by DVD you will see a nice long list of titles you can choose from to check out and watch over the winter break.

As always, we welcome suggestions and we are glad to order anything you might need for the library.

Snow

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth

I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.

He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.


Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.

Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.

I didn't know where I was going with this.

They were on his property, I said.


When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.

Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.


But why were they on his property, he asked.


- David Berman