My Small Boat

11 hads
Peter where John had had “had”, had had “had had”; “had had” had had more marks from the examiner.
21 ands
Wouldn’t the sentence “I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign” have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and […]

The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again,
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last […]

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

There they go. I must run and catch up with them, beause I am their leader!

He & She
When I am dead you’ll find it hard,
Said he,
To ever find another man
Like me,
What makes you think, as I suppose
You do,
I’d ever want another man
Like you?

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
there is rapture in the lonely shore,
there is society where none intrudes,
by the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but nature more.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Loneliness
A hawk hovers in the air.
Two white gulls float on the stream.
Soaring with the wind, it is easy
To drop and seize
Birds who foolishly drift with the current.
Where the dew sparkles in the grass,
The spider’s web waits for its prey.
The processes of nature resemble the business of men.
I stand alone with ten thousand sorrows.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

His dentist had once told him that he was one of the lucky few whose teeth would outlive him; he would have preferred his work to, but you can’t have everything.

April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.