Warm & fuzzy

Last night, Lily fell asleep around 10 (a wonderous miracle). I got all absorbed in uploading pictures to her blog, and Tomek unearthed a book of love poems from around the world from our bedroom bookshelf.

He sat on the floor near me and flipped through the book, occassionally reading a poem out loud to me. There was a longer Polish poem he wanted to read to me, but we waited till we were in bed to continue, because I evidently don't have the mental capacity to listen to a poem and upload photos at the same time. Ha.

So once we were snuggled in bed, he read me the poem, and then started reading me some more. The collection is really cool, a lot of old old OLD poems, and from all over the world. All translated to English, but from what he could see of the Polish poems, the translations were well done.

He read me this Japanese poem, written by an anonymous frontier guard in the 8th century:

While the leaves of bamboo rustle
On a cold and frosty night,
The seven layers of clobber I wear
Are not so warm, not so warm
As the body of my wife.

He thought that was beyond sweet, and I got to feeling all warm and fuzzy inside that we were sharing a love of mine--so often it seems we are so different, but get along so well. It's nice to be able to live in this degree of happiness with someone, but sometimes I wished we had more in common. Last night we did. I have a lot of books of poetry, most of which I've never read through completely. I hope that LB continues to go to bed earlier so we can have time to read poetry to each other.

This morning I got to thinking about the poetry books I've bought over the years, and I went hunting through my poetry shelf . Most of the books I have have some kind of story behind them.



My Heart Soarswas given to me by my Grampa. He wasn't my Grampa by blood, but he was living with and in love with my Grandma when she passed away. He unofficially adopted my mom as his daughter. He sent me that book for my birthday, 23 years after he'd given it to my Grandma for her birthday. The inscription inside to me is under the inscription he wrote to her, all those years ago. Tucked inside in a little cardboard frame was a photo of them at a restaurant called Lulu Belle's. I've had this book for 9 years now, and it was only a couple of months ago that Tomek discovered another photo behind the photo of my Grandparents. A photo of my mom, when she was 19.


The Book of Prejudices is by Tim Landers. I heard him read at a Poets for Peace reading a few years ago. His books are hand-bound, and each poem is a photocopy of the hand-written original.

I also found my book of poems by Heinrich Heine, where the poems appear in German on one page and the English translation is on the facing page--my idea was to read the poems and learn German.

I guess I'm slowly rediscovering my interests, and getting a better grip on what all I'm going to do once LB is a little older and I'm able to pursue career interests, and even just personal interests. I was on track writing a lot of poetry a while back, mostly thanks to shenry, but that fizzled out... time to get it back on track again. ghost has inspired me, with his art on ghostspace, and his recent cardboard creations for the black and white exhibit. I suppose my creativity never really died, it just went into hibernation for a while.

Wake up, dammit.