Scott Bielinski > Recent Status Updates

“Mother had chosen the pale rose wool because she knew just how lovely it would look against the snowy winter sky, but in my foolishness I had disliked it. I had had my own way, for Mother never attempted to force any. thing on me. During all this time Mother had not said a word of explanation but had waited these twenty years until I was able to appreciate the beauty of the color myself.“

“The empty chair, the quiet home, remind the widow and the orphan of their loneliness. Let the bereaved ones feel that in this cold and selfish world they have in their elder at least one human friend left.” (61)

He asked them, knowing he will soon be dead,
to this last meal. As birds fly up with dread,
hearing a shot, their hands shrink from the bread
and the twelve startle at his prophecy, fluttering around the table in despair,
and scatter, seeking an escape. But he
like twilight arriving is everywhere.

“Why have we come here? To fish, of course,
and to savor the contingency of being

between bites; to wait, wondering at the old
highway that plunges into the lake; to watch
thick thunderheads descending from the north.”

“The Lord Jesus hath as great and as large an interest in the weakest saints, as he hath in the strongest. He hath the interest of a friend, and the interest of a father, . . . and the interest of a husband; and, therefore, though saints be weak . . . yet having as great and as large an interest in them as in the strongest saints, he cannot but overlook their weakness, and keep a fixed eye upon their graces.”

“Why was I chosen to begin at the end, to be the last breath before the book of time closed? My parents knew this was my destiny. They had called me Selah.” (50)

“Reading Milosz”

Sometimes your tone
transforms us for a moment,
we believe-truly-
that every day is sacred,

that poetry-how to put it?-
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside, and the city's ordinary din resumes-
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

“No one should shun the companionship of Czeslaw Milosz’s books.” (125)

And laying aside the pen, dipped
Not in tears’ volatile liquid
But in the black ink of the heart’s well,
To read again what the hand has written
To the many voices’ quiet dictation.

“Everyone was talking about ‘the unstoppable stampede into chaos’, …. and the ‘approaching catastrophe’ without a clear notion of … these frightening words, since, he surmised, this epidemic of fear was not born out of … increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe…” (95-96)

Starting tonight so the Swedish Academy does the right thing. Give the Nobel Prize to the Hungarian prophet!

Can’t stop laughing

Totally stunned when I read “Emblems of Conduct.” A stellar poem. Then I read he plagiarized it! Sad.