A Pair of Poets

Special note of thanks: Thank you to everyone who stopped by to help celebrate my 500th blip-day yesterday! Wow! Your views, comments, stars, and favorites on my photo of spring colors and reflections at Black Moshannon really made my day! My picture even made the Spotlight page, something that has only happened a few times during the year and a half that I've been on blip. That was such a thrill! Thank you! I am so grateful! I will respond personally to everyone who left a comment, though it may take me a few days to catch up. And now, with little fanfare, I return you to our regularly scheduled blips. :-)

Spring is springing up all over! Our yard is full of daffodils in shades of yellow, pink, and white. A few brightly colored tulips are starting to show up. Our beloved hummingbird made her much-anticipated annual return on Saturday morning just before 8 am, zooming past the deck door windows at about six inches above ground-level and startling the Tabby, who was sitting wide-eyed by the doors looking out.

One of the delicate treasures of my spring yard is the poet's daffodil, Narcissus poeticus. This variety of daffodil is one of the longest cultivated in Europe. It was brought back to England during the Crusades. Before that, it was cultivated in ancient Greece. Some scholars believe that the daffodil featured in the legend of Narcissus was this very one.

The poet's daffodil flower is small and its white petals are paper-thin. The center of its fragrant bloom is yellow, surrounded by a thin ring of red (and sometimes green as well, but I did not notice any green in this particular one).

The soundtrack to accompany this photo is Stevie Nicks, singing the lovely and haunting song, Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You? Stevie has indicated in interviews that she wrote this song for Joe Walsh, one of the true loves of her life. Here is what she says about it in the liner notes of her CD, Timespace:

~~~~~~
I guess in a very few rare cases, some people find someone that they fall in love with the very first time they see them . . . from across the room, from a million miles away. Some people call it love at first sight, and of course, I never believed in that until that night I walked into a party after a gig at the hotel, and from across the room, without my glasses, I saw this man and I walked straight to him. He held out his hands to me, and I walked straight into them. I remember thinking, I can never be far from this person again . . . he is my soul. He seemed to be in a lot of pain, though he hid it well.

But finally, a few days later (we were in Denver), he rented a jeep and drove me up into the snow covered hills of Colorado . . . for about 2 hours. He wouldn't tell me where we were going, but he did tell me a story of a little daughter that he had lost. To Joe, she was much more than a child. She was three and a half, and she could relate to him.

I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things going on on the road, and he decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she EVER complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain.

As we drove up to this beautiful park (it was snowing a little bit), he came around to open my door and help me down, and when I looked up, I saw the park . . . his baby's park, and I burst into tears saying, 'You built a drinking fountain here for her, didn't you?' I was right: under a huge beautiful hanging tree, was a tiny silver drinking fountain. I left Joe to get to it, and on it, it said, dedicated to HER and all the others who were too small to get a drink.

So he wrote a song for her, and I wrote a song for him . . . 'This is your song, ' I said to the people, but it was Joe's song. Thank you, Joe, for the most committed song I ever wrote. But more than that, thank you for inspiring me in so may ways. Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore, since we took that drive.
~~~~~~

Poet . . . priest of nothing . . .

Legend.