Re: NBC Happy Halloween

A great book and movie too.mike
"colonialacres" <colonialacres@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Rufless" <goats@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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It's my first with no daughters at home. I feel ....strange!

A few years back when my kids were in the midst of adolescence I found
this poem in The New Yorker. Those of you with teenagers, especially
teenage daughters, may find it as lovely as I do.

To A Fog Spirit
On Halloween


Made up and masked, you stream into the night,
your cape floating like gossamer behind you,
the moon illuminating what you are and are not:
a cool customer, slippery as quicksilver.

I cannot fathom you exactly, though I try to.
Lately, I've noticed you're all about change,
change and silence. And you have properties:
you expand and contract, filling whatever

space you're in, or self-contained as a cat.
Some mornings, impersonating one of us,
you wake, dress, eat, then vanish out the door,
the room suddenly too silent, the day clear as a bell.

I remember a May morning twelve years ago,
before you were you, when I woke to a landscape
wiped clean as a blackboard and knew you were hiding
inside a stillness different from any I had ever known.

And that night in January, after our long journey,
when we were almost there, and the bridge to the island
disappeared, and we pushed on anyway (did we have a choice?)
into black foggy bottomless space and didn't fall--

O fog spirit, are you a magician?
How did you do that?


Does fog beget fog?
No, you have a mother and father.
So creep back to this house
and with a hand solid as my own
rap hard! three times on the door,

and when it opens, as it will,
step through the portal and change,
change back into my daughter again.


--Elizabeth Spires

Nice!
My favorite Halloween poem's more sinister:

Crystal water turns to dark
Where ere it's presence leaves it's mark
And boiling currents pound like drums
When something wicked this way comes...

A presence dark invades the fair
And gives the horses ample scare
Chaos rains and panic fills the air
When something wicked this way comes...

Ill winds mark it's fearsome flight,
And autumn branches creak with fright.
The landscape turns to ashen crumbs,
When something wicked this way comes...

Flowers bloom as black as night
Removing color from your sight
Nightmarish vines block your way
Thorns reach out to catch their prey

And by the pricking of your thumbs
Realize that their poison numbs
From frightful blooms, rank odors seep
Bats & beasties fly & creep

'Cross this evil land, ill winds blow
Despite the darkness, mushrooms glow
All will rot & decompose
For something wicked this way grows...

--- Ray Bradbury



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