Skip to main content

Adieu 2009

Image
By
This past year, I wrote (at least) 256 poems. Not all of them, of course, were any good at all. Some, I fervently hope, were worth preserving. Writing a good poem, even one, still strikes me as a worthwhile life goal. Below are two poems written on this final day of 2009. Both follow the traditional haiku conventions of 5/7/5 syllables per line. Both are based on and are informed by a seasonal/natural reference.

Happy New Year!


last day of the year
sunshine clears the mountain road
snow in the shadows


Wisdom of seasons:
blossom to green leaf to fall
to bare branch. Repeat.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Jamie - don't know if you've ever seen Ted Kooser speak, but he says that 28 days out of 30, he's a complete failure as a poet. He writes every morning so that he'll be writing the 2 days when he's pretty good at it.
January 4, 2010 at 4:05 PM
Jamie said…
This is so true.
January 6, 2010 at 6:56 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uncle Bobby's Wedding

By
Recently, a library patron challenged (urged a reconsideration of the ownership or placement of) a book called "Uncle Bobby's Wedding." Honestly, I hadn't even heard of it until that complaint. But I did read the book, and responded to the patron, who challenged the item through email and requested that I respond online (not via snail-mail) about her concerns. I suspect the book will get a lot of challenges in 2008-2009. So I offer my response, purging the patron's name, for other librarians. Uncle Bobby's wedding June 27, 2008 Dear Ms. Patron: Thank you for working with my assistant to allow me to fit your concerns about “Uncle Bobby's Wedding,” by Sarah S. Brannen, into our “reconsideration” process. I have been assured that you have received and viewed our relevant policies: the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read, Free Access to Libraries for Minors, the Freedom to View, and our Reconsideration Policy. The intent of providing all tha...
455 comments
Read more

Installing Linux on a 2011 Macbook Pro

By
I had two MacBook Pros, both 13" models from late 2011. One had 4 gigs of RAM, and the other 8. Both of them were intolerably slow. In the first case, I wound up installing CleanMyMac , which did arcane things to various files, and put up alerts to warn me about disappearing memory. But it made the machine useable again, albeit not exactly speedy. I changed some habits: Safari as browser rather than Firefox or Chrome. I tried to keep tabs down to four or five. The second Mac had bigger problems. Its charger was shot, but even with that replaced, the battery tapped out at 75%. More importantly, the whole disk had been wiped, which meant that it wouldn't boot. Recently, I had downloaded a couple of Linux distributions ("distros") on USB drives. Elementary OS 5.1 (Hera) was reputed to be a lightweight, beautiful distro that shared some aesthetics with the Mac OS. So I thought I'd give it a try. Ahead of time, I tried to read up on how difficult it might be to...
6 comments
Read more

elementary os 8 on the MacBook Pro

By
My personal laptop is a Chromebook. I've been using it for 5 years. I throw it in my backpack and rarely turn it off. It has terrific battery life and does most of what I need it to. But it's begun to show its age. First the internal mic went out. OK, I could plug in my phone's headphones. Then the camera went out. OK, I could buy a camera--but this starts to look like a trend.  I realized I might need to have a backup computer, so dug up my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was running elementary OS 5.1, Hera, based on Ubuntu. (See my earlier post on this combo.) elementary is a good match for a Mac. Its use of the Pantheon desktop environment gives it a sleek, light, colorful look.  But Hera has been superseded, meaning it no longer has security updates. I didn't want to mess around on the internet with a vulnerable machine. And unlike some operating systems, upgrading meant more than issuing some commands. I would have to reinstall it. So I downloaded the latest elementary--versi...
Post a Comment
Read more