Elizabeth Oakley Weaver

To Think

A person doesn't need to go to college to learn facts.
He can get them from books. 
The value of a liberal arts college education is that
it trains the mind to think. That's something you 
can't learn from textbooks.
If a person (has the) ability, 
a college education helps develop it. 

Albert Einstein  
(from "Einstein: His Life and Times" by Philipp Frank)

Sow

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap 
but by the seeds that you plant.

Robert Lewis Stevenson

Disconnected

Oxfam‘s January 14, 2024 report, Inequality Inc., explores the disparity between the uber-wealthy and the rest of society.

Since 2020, five billion people have become poorer, while the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes—at a rate of $14 million per hour.

This election is not about Harris, Trump or an individual issue. It’s about what the United States of America represents, for us and the world; how it provides for its citizens and the environment; how we care not only for the living and those who have sacrificed for this country, but also for those who will follow, which one could interpret in line with the Native American-Iroquois law: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”

This election is not about the next four years or a party; but instead, whether we choose that “all…are created equal…with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty and… happiness,” not merely as pursuit, but experienced (as described in this Emory U. article), or if we want something different for our nation.

Each vote matters, which is why so many have literally sacrificed or died to protect this right for every eligible citizen.

Fragile

I broke 
       something      today,
   and I realized I should break
       something      once a week
               to      remind        me
      how fragile life is.

Andy Warhol

Ubiquitous

In every religion, there's love
yet love has no religion.

Rumi

Soul

One of the most important discriminations we can make 
… is the difference between things that beckon to us 
and things that call from our souls.

              Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Goats!

video by Elizabeth

Let’s hear it for the Goats!: preventing fires and saving lives.

Soaked

SOAKED


I want you in my home to know you’re not alone 
in those long-shadowed halls paced by perpetually 
lost—dementia scouring their last stains of memory

          more than safe,
          I want you to feel safe
          yet I’m drowning in this 
          deep dank bog of lung

rain sluices from leaves beneath a starless sky
as distant shouts urge me to find my way back
yet I am beyond lost having unwrapped and dropped 
their safety rope from my waist so I could reach you
 
       all my cells replicated yours when you were 
       my sole cord to life—for that I worshipped you 
               till the God, Hormones, ascended

as I stumble over elephantine roots, 
machete through plants so large dinosaurs 
must still exist on this swampy earth,
my lungs match each step's suck of mud, 
every breath a drowning, yet I won’t 
release this taut line between us mottled 
with white ash and blood dark wine nor
understand how your Emmental brain 
won't let you walk or know where you are 
in time, yet provides lucid wit and end-
less memory for the inconsequential

                                    

       years now since I severed and flung 
our rope in your flames yet you remain 
      tangled as worry and seared to my palm
when I reach for you in wake or in dream
      unable to rest or breathe for want of you

Thank you to the editors of Melancholy Hyperbole for first publishing this poem in an earlier version.