Unable to stifle a yawn

It’s true that time with children is precious and fleeting, but sometimes children’s interests--especially if those interests are the result of marketing hype--are a big yawn. My hat’s off to this fellow, trying to wrap his brain around the girls’ enthusiasm for Barbie’s adventures. 

I took this photo when I went to Powell’s City of Books as a reward for remaining on task for eight grueling hours, learning Lightroom. The hardest thing for me is importing and organizing the files and the library. Once I get to the processing, it’s fairly similar to what I’ve been doing, though I’m unfamiliar with the order and presentation of tools on the screen and feel clumsy and slow. I hope I will improve in the fullness of time. This shot comes from my first Lightroom-processed photo series.

At Powell’s I chose two sublime books of poetry as gifts for friends, and of course I get to read them myself before I give them away. The first is Glowing Enigmas, by Nelly Sachs, who escaped Nazi Germany in 1940 on one of the last planes carrying Jewish civilians and lived the rest of her life in exile, in a tiny bed-sitter in Sweden. The poems in this volume were written in German in the 1960s, shortly before Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. They were translated into English by Michael Hamburger. Here’s a sample: 

As I wait here 
time yearns out at sea
but is pulled back again and again by its blue hair
does not reach eternity--
Still no love between the planets
but a secret understanding already quivers--

The other is by Oregon’s new poet laureate, a young Native American woman named Elizabeth Woody. Seven Hands, Seven Hearts includes both prose and poetry, and her prose is as powerful as her poems. Here’s a paragraph:

The flat teeth of the morning sun chew at the blisters of the old tar-papered house. In the garden that thrives under a cloak of sagging cheesecloth, the grasshoppers pose on the promise of a meal. Granma is framed in the kitchen window as the tongues of curtains remain out from the morning breeze. Even with the hollyhocks’ colorful bonnets up tight against the wall, the house can appear as barren as a piano without ivory.

Who can deny the bliss of a few hours in a book store without the need to read Barbie stories? I am so grateful.