How's it going?

Wow! Today has just flown by and I haven’t done a proper post in days. How’s everyone doing? Enjoying the lovely spring weather?

I’ll be on the Hill for a meeting in the morning, but I’ll try to get something up by end of the day tomorrow.

Right this second on the radio, U2’s Stuck in the Moment is playing . . . boy, every time I hear that song, it just strikes so close to home . . .

In the meantime, I found this poem on “Poetry Daily” about a local DC housing complex that felt kind of powerful to me today.

Sursum Corda
By Hillel Schwartz

. . a housing development in Northwest Washington, DC

The hart leaps.

Through the bracken of Children's Island, its sedge and mallow,
through the brush and tangle of Stadium Narrows,
the hart leaps.

Past the Canada geese gulls starlings sparrows & crows,
past flea market flannels cottons linens corduroys,
blooms of rust curling over cast-iron stump-legged stoves,
teflon peeling off bundt pans frying pans & bake trays,
the hart leaps.

Across grooved tailgates of pick-ups & second-life trucks
& white scoop-lipped concrete deadweights of a Grand Prix track
that roared once into the records & now sits silent,
skirting winter-bald grass & a golf club's loopy fence,
indefensible, uphill on icebroken pavement
& a bookhouse for bombed-out Beirut, past 19th &
M where a five-inch blade five times five days ago was
driven into a delivery man in busy
daylight, the hart leaps.

Into seven-square square blocks of gridded deerpark moor,
of hunting, coney-poaching, Crown lands & highwaymen,
a wilderness for the staking and taking, neither
National Arboretum nor oaks of Dumbarton
but Sursum Corda, that they shall be lifted up, here
in Jubal, glory & comfort, where more are fallen
& dead more quickly than stroke, than shock, in this red square
& plaza of promises, catholic talisman
of fair winds & crossings for a Northwest Passage, for
a land of lows, storm fronts, mortuary cold, a land
of the could-have-been, streets earstruck with seven-on-four
beats of blood in the hot walls of ears, blood like lichen
on stubble of old sidewalk & cyclone fence under
tundra skies of lost dominion, lost direction
from courtyard to courtyard, gravel to cement, through beer-
bottle grass to Coke-green glass to yellow-white to brown
to blue, the hart leaps.

Greatgrandmas look through torn curtains to see him rampant,
tearing through bushes, his horns flashing with raw bonelight,
an emergency of wonder, brown-red, ambulant,
their heraldic stag of tincture sanguine & fur bright
with sweat & flecks of foil. Now the children chase after,
fingers flared from their heads like horns, prancing in his wake,
or fists to their mouths for the loud brass of hunting horns,
dashing in greyhound frenzy & whippet crazy-eights.
What's happening here? Who is running the tapestry
through the looms, the stag around the tight bends & charges
of the NW, over fine dust, spent shells, & dark green
mazes with ancient etched numbers & flowered marges?
What game is afoot? In their black-&-whites the Finest
hear the sightings crackle in over their speakers, call
for soft-poison darts, doctors, game wardens, riot vests,
revving their engines for what may come down after all
to high-speed pursuit, wrong-ways on one-way avenues,
dashes over medians & dividers. Copters
are circling now, networks covering this breaking news
as his hooves strike blue fires across the faulted curbs
of the Project, his horns lit by flashes & first hints
of sunset, his head twisting in a mounting panic,
his sense of true north lost among the bands of children,
the rush of rotors, district captains hustling manic
in their blinds, lips to bullhorns, blue flash red flash white flash,
lost among the pounding bass of boom-car double amps,
out of sight of tall trees, beyond salt lick or high grass,
he stops, breathing harder than first thunder, & stamps. Stamps.
The whippet-children stand stockstill, wary as old hounds.
Dealers drop their seal-tite bags. Traffic slows to a cough.
Copters hover in five o'clock suspense. . . . Bring him down,
hears a crouching man through an earpiece small as what's left
of shooting & stars once they fall to earth, & the heart
leaps.