For as much as I can get ear worms of songs stuck in my head for weeks at a time, I also find that a line or two of poetry can worm into my head, reverberate, expand, and live a full multi-week life, and not exit.
Lately, I have had two lines of poetry on rotation in my head along with will.i.am’s* “Chunky” from Madagascar 2, one line from “The Act” by William Carlos Williams and one line from Ursula Le Guin’s “The Old Lady”.
Tonight I will point you to William’s “The Act” as I blogged about it when Vanessa, Edel, and I were turning it into an interactive flash piece in February of 2006:
The Act
There were the roses, in the rain.
Don’t cut them, I pleaded.
They won’t last, she said.
But they’re so beautiful
where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.
Tomorrow or the next day I will blog about Le Guin’s wonderful new poetry book, Incredible Good Fortune. For now I am off to bed.
* p.s. Am I the only one who thinks that will.i.am and animation team at Dreamworks are having good fun at poking at “My Humps?”