Chag Pesach Sameach and Happy Passover to all those who celebrate ✡️☘️ "Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy." ~ Anne Frank

“April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay La Belle Jardiniere • Avril 🎨 Eugène Grasset (1896)

Poems for Lent (Day 37) D.H. Lawrence

As March ends, and April begins... • Philip Larkin •

With her gift of canine foresight, Rua says to keep the head up. It'll all come good.

Poems for Lent (Day 36) • William Blake •

An exquisite poem that finds Pathos and Carpe Diem shaking hands like old friends. A.E. Housman 🖎

"It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living." ~ Guy de Maupassant Boulevard Montmartre in Spring 🎨 Camille Pissarro (1897)

Poems for Lent (Day 35) • Christian Wiman •

On the cusp... • Siegfried Sassoon •

Many thanks to @meljdavies1.bsky.social for letting me know that today is the birthday of R.S. Thomas (29th March, 1913.) Note: the word 'quotidian' that appears in the following poem conveys the idea of mundane, commonplace, unremarkable.

Poems for Lent (Palm Sunday) G.K. Chesterton

"We gazed at each other, and looked at the green meadow o'er which the cool evening was just passing, and we wept. Right then, Life was dearer to me than all my wisdom had ever been." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'

Some more Lenten poetry... R.S. Thomas

"Begin at once to live, and count each day as a separate life." ~ Seneca the Younger

Poems for Lent (Day 34) • Gerard Manley Hopkins •

Drifting off to... • Jorge Luis Borges •

Poems for Lent (Day 33) R.S. Thomas

"That best portion of a man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love." ~ William Wordsworth

Most worthy of praise is the...

"Dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks." ~ Franz Kafka

Poems for Lent (Day 32) 'Poem of the One World' • Mary Oliver •

Gently read... • Jane Taylor •

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." ~ Kahlil Gibran Blossom of Pain (1898) 🎨 Edvard Munch

A poem I wrote a few years back. 𝐍.𝐁. It's not based on anyone I know, and the suicide alluded to in it was not, in the truest sense, a real event.

"The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better." ~ Emile Zola Lane of Cherry Blossom 🎨 Ingeborg Eggertz

Poems for Lent (Day 31) • Wiliam Cowper •

"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder." ~ G.K. Chesterton The Rainbow (1892) 🎨 Nikolay Dubovskoy

Poems for Lent (Day 30) • Rudyard Kipling •

"Beauty is not all brightness. In the shadowlands of pain and despair we find slow, dark beauty. The primeval conversation between darkness and beauty is not audible to the human ear, and the threshold where they engage each other is not visible to the eye." ~ John O'Donohue

"Let us ... repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life." ~ Virginia Woolf Open Window at Collioure 🎨 Henri Matisse (1905)

Just J.R.R. Tolkien casually coming up with an answer for the ages...

"Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary: animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems for Lent (Day 29) • Kenneth Steven •

It's so real...

"Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith." ~ Hilaire Belloc Christ in the Wilderness (1872) 🎨 Ivan Kramskoi

Poems for Lent (5th Sunday) • Mary Oliver •

"And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed Of mosses and flowers To pillow thy head." ~ John Keats Dream (1905) 🎨 Joan Brull i Vinyoles

A poem that never fails to make my soul ache. • James Wright •

Incredibly, we've had 3 days in a row of glorious sunshine here in Ireland!! ☀️

"It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment." ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Spring Landscape with Violets 🎨 Stanislav Zhukovsky (1935)

Poems for Lent (Day 28)

Tarry here a while, and read...

Poems for Lent (Day 27) • Kenneth Steven •

An amazing poem. • Paul Durcan •

"Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable: they happen in a space that no word has ever entered." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems for Lent (Day 26) • Derek Mahon •

"We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it." ~ C.S. Lewis

• Lisel Mueller •

"It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution." ~ Anton Chekhov Anemones • Spring Morning (1901) 🎨 Peder Mørk Mønsted