Poetry Friday: In the Other Gardens

For the last two weeks it seems we have been plunging headlong into fall (okay, not counting yesterday and the day before, when summer put in a sticky, unpleasant curtain call). Oversleeping because the sun isn't up when I get up, running out of evening and needing a flashlight to do evening chores (flustering the chickens, who are smart enough to notice when it starts to get dark . . .). And then, last evening, whiffs of smoke drifted in the window - potent enough to send us into the yard to be sure it wasn't OUR place that was smoldering, but not strong enough to trace to its source. And so on to today's poem, a paean to a bygone era, when we were unwise enough to fill the air with particulate (not that we're much wiser now, filling the air with clean-but-deadly carbon dioxide, but that's a rant for another forum . . . )

From one of my favorite poets: Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

Rules for Writers

Courtesy of those who know a thing or two on the subject . . .


Don't write about Man, write about a man

-- E.B. White


Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words as we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.

-- Theodor Seuss Geisel


Never use the passive when you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

-- George Orwell


Get black on white.

-- Guy de Maupassant


A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

-- Thomas Mann


The first discipline is the realization that there is a discipline – that all art begins and ends with discipline – that any art is first and foremost a craft.

-- Archibald MacLeish


The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

-- Voltaire


There is but one art . . . to omit. O' if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson


If you keep working, inspiration comes.

-- Alexander Calder


The more particular, the more specific you are, the more universal you are.

-- Nancy Hale


Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan – that is the rule.

-- John Fowles


Don't say the old lady screamed – bring her on and let her scream.

-- Mark Twain