Nat'l Poetry Month No. 17

What a lovely poem....

April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.

Langston Hughes

Dang!

"I'm just a lucky slob from [Cadiz] Ohio who happened to be in the right place at the right time."

Wm. Clark Gable (1901-1960)
Some slob. I meant to post something here yesterday, it being the first of the month & Clark Gable's 111th birthday & all. I really, really did, but life & work intervened. I might have waxed on about how marvelous he was in "San Francisco" and even more so in "Idiot's Delight." About the glorious cinema moment when he makes his first appearance in GWTW - at the bottom of the staircase @ the Wilkes's. In 1939, when pretty much all of Europe was going to hell.

And of course, yesterday was the anniversary of Langston Hughes.

"We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line."

"Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."

James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

A good person would have written about Mr. Hughes on his birthday, never mind it being the first day of good old Black History Month. But as I say, I didn't get around to it, being preoccupied with illustrations, with finding out that the direction of the book I'm illustrating is taking a different direction and getting mad & flustered & taking a nap & fussing w/dwgs for Laura Ingalls Wilder notecards instead & anyway, Langston Hughes is, as is many another valiant African American, ever so much more than some BHM icon. In any event, now it's the 2nd of February and the 100th anniversary (!!!) of the birth of Elizabeth Gladys Millvina Dean (2 Feb 1912-31 May 2009), who was a round-cheeked babe in her mother's arms when her folks & her older brother, Bertram, boarded HMS Titanic, bound for a new life in America. Alas.

God rest her & Clark & Langston, too, at safe harbor in the bright City of the Dead.

February's Making a Lousy 1st Impression

So, if you really desperately wish to know which distinguished dead people were born on this here day in history, you are (a) a kindred, albeit dorky spirit and (b) invited to go to this link. If you do, you'll see that the bright soul known to us as Langston Hughes came into the world in Joplin, Missouri [home these days of my writer friend, Veda Boyd Jones, who tells me that she's got 18" of snow out in her front yard), in 1 Feb, 1902 (first year of TR's administration, when Mrs. Steinbeck of Salinas, California was really pregnant w/her son John) the year in which Beatrix Potter published Peter Rabbit and Arthur Conan Doyle's readers were introduced to The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Ah well. Enough of this cabin-fevered hoohah. A glitter-bitter cold white blanket, at least a foot thick is draped over available surface thanks to a perfectly dreadful winter storm going on across the land so there are probably about 700 weather people outside [needlessly] shivering into the TV cameras, telling folks all about it. Me, I spent the day cutting pieces of navy blue cotton which I'll be sewing together, in hopes that the assemblage will look like a a bodice for the 1860s costume I'm making... stay tuned.