More Views of Snow and Ice

 

Monday was another really cold day. I needed some things from the pharmacy, so went for a walk downtown to the city centre. It takes a good while for the river to freeze even when it's as cold as now; but ice has begun to form along the river banks in some places, especially where the water is shallow. One also sees sheets of ice floating along in the open water, and sometimes piling up, like here.

This fence is a barrier between a street and the railway that runs in the valley down below.

It's rather unusual to see snow staying more or less untouched on fences and plants like this for several days in a row - but there's been no wind since the snow fell, and the temperature has not risen above freezing point either. Today was a lot milder than the last couple of days, but it still wasn't thawing - so it still looked pretty much the same when I walked past there again today, now in the other direction.

 

This time stopping for photos on the bridge over the river by the dam and waterfall.

Upstream, on the other side of the bridge, the river calm like a mirror... 

 

* * * * * * * * *

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem, —
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

Poem by Emily Dickinson

Blue Roses

These roses on a grave in the cemetery made me stop and look twice. Surely there is no such thing as a blue rose? …

Quite right: On closer inspection, they turned out to be artificial – dewdrops and all.

The question kept nagging me: Why?

Of course I’ll never know for sure what the person was thinking who put them there…

But when I googled “blue rose”, this is what I found:

Due to the absence in nature of blue roses they have come to symbolise mystery and longing to attain the impossible, with some cultures going so far as to say that the holder of a blue rose will have his wishes granted. (Wikipedia)

And then this poem by Rudyard Kipling, which totally convinced me that the choice of grave decoration must have been very deliberate, rather than just “odd”:

Roses red and roses white
Plucked I for my love's delight.
She would none of all my posies--
Bade me gather her blue roses.
Half the world I wandered through,
Seeking where such flowers grew.
Half the world unto my quest
Answered me with laugh and jest.
Home I came at wintertide,
But my silly love had died
Seeking with her latest breath
Roses from the arms of Death.
It may be beyond the grave
She shall find what she would have.
Mine was but an idle quest--
Roses white and red are best!

The Finished Ice Sculpture

Ice sculpture by Ragnhild Brodow Sandelius (Borås 2011)

Inscription: “stjärnbilderna stampa i sina spiltor”
= “the star constellations stamping in their stalls”
Words from the poem Storm* by Tomas Tranströmer,
Swedish poet awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2011

I my previous post Straight Out of the Ice  you can see the artist
working on the ice sculpture. Luckily I was able to go back today to take a photo of the finished work as well. (How long it will remain standing depends on the weather, and the weather just now is rather unreliable!)

This ice sculpture is a tribute to Sweden’s probably most popular living poet, Tomas Tranströmer, who received the Nobel prize in literature yesterday.

* I found a translation of the poem at BookBrowse:

Storm

The man on a walk suddenly meets the old
giant oak like an elk turned to stone with
its enormous antlers against the dark green castle wall
of the fall ocean.

Storm from the north. It's nearly time for the
rowanberries to ripen. Awake in the night he
hears the constellations far above the oak
stamping in their stalls.

~ Tomas Tranströmer; translation Robert Bly ~

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

The last few days have been quite an astonishing mix of misty autumnal mornings vs. warm and summery afternoons. It’s almost like being in two different climates on the same day.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
      Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

John Keats – To Autumn

 

 

 

 

 

Boots On the Table, Please!

Ah, fill the Cup! What boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our Feet.
Unborn To-morrow, and dead yesterday
Why fret about them if today be sweet?

'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ (11th century)
translated by Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883)

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For Straight-Out-Of-the-Camera Sunday

Poems on the Sky

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~ Kahlil Gibran ~

These pictures are all from the same photo,
just cropped in different ways.
(The original at the bottom.)

For Skywatch Friday