"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
This entry was posted on 12/20/2009 9:48 AM and is filed under Great Poems Online.
Many of our current Christmas traditions originated in Anglo-Saxon countries, so the standard imagery for the holiday season reflects a Northern climate: snow, pine trees, holly berries, and the like. Winning Writers subscriber Liz Davies, currently living in Manila, sent us this different but no less festive depiction of Christmas down south. "Happy Holidays--Maligayang Pasko--as they say here in The Philippines," Liz writes. Enjoy more of her work at Winning Writers here and here.
Tropical Christmas
Night falls early now, on a cool breeze
After a clear salmon and silver evening.
Little bats caper, stitching the skies
With carefree parabolas, and twittering
With the joy of mosquitoes for supper.
The roads light up one by one in the dusk
Colours deepen as night falls, and old Manila
Awakes; the ancient socialite adorns herself,
Drapes herself in glittering, flashing gems.
The parols*, like freewheeling rose windows
Seem to float and spin along the roads
As concrete falls away in the velvet dark,
And waterfalls of cool fire fall,
Fall on trees in icicles and stars.
Fleets of electric reindeer fly, legs flailing
And getting nowhere, and the malls deck their halls
With giant spiral crystals of styrofoam, so strange
For people who have never seen the snow.
