Neil's+page

//I chose these four poems because they all reflect some form of change.//
= __**//Ethics//**__=

By Linda Pastan (Pg. 39)
In ethics class so many years ago our teacher asked this question every fall: If there were a fire in a museum, which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs caring little for pictures or old age we'd opt one year for life, the next for art and always half-heartedly. Sometimes the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander some drafty, half imagined museum. One year, feeling clever, I replied why not let the woman decide herself? Linda, the teacher would report, eschews the burdens of responsibility. This fall in a real museum I stand before a real Rembrandt, old woman, or nearly so, myself. The colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter-the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by children.

By Portia Nelson
//Chapter I//

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost I am helpless it isn’t my fault. . . . . It takes forever to find a way out.

//Chapter II//

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place but it isn’t my fault. . . . It still takes a long time to get out.

//Chapter III//

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in. . . . It is a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

//Chapter IV//

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

//Chapter V//

I walk down another street.

Bill Collins (Pg. 168-169)
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three

It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians are flattened by safes falling from rooftops mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body's rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens -- the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

By Robert Frost (Pg. 196)
Nature's first green is gold Her hardest hue to hold Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.