Orange and yellow

I walked down my hill and around the Kai Tai Lagoon a few days ago. The trees are putting on an amazing show. It interests me that most of the trees the city is planting are not native. We have a lot of non-native maples. I feel a bit ambivalent, but they certainly turn red! The orange one here is an oak. There are native oaks and I have not figured out if this is one.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day. I think the leaves are taking their turn at being flowers before they fall.

Black and white

Pandas are black and white, clarity
between the parts, yet both are present together
Pandemic has lessened humans charity
Stress rises, fights and a turn to war weather.
It’s hard to fight a virus way smaller than a bee
And as they change and attack birds and us anew
Frustration rises and we attack the humans that we see
We take sides, black or white, and don’t see that we’re a stew
Perspective changes, white to black and back
The pandas eat their daily bamboo pounds
Unworried which parts are white or black
I hope they are far from the crying bombing rounds
I hope every person has the charity
to give all others love and parity.

We are singing Frostiana, poems by Robert Frost, set to music by Randall Thompson, in chorus. The ending of this makes me cry:
“So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.”

I took the photograph in Oregon this month, on a Pandasonic (ha, ha).

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: clarity.

Fan

There aren’t two roads diverged before me
But a fan of roads and possibilities
Poetry and writing, music and medicine,
Art and quilting, paints and knitting,
Cats and travel, dance and friends.
I spread the fan with joy
as life opens like a flower.
Not two roads, neither one best
but the daily gift of the sunrise and a song.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: observe.

red hot

A friend and I go to Hawaii, to the big island, in March of 2018. The road near Kilauea is closed because of fumes. The level of the lava had dropped. My friend and I find a place where we can see it in the distance and wait for nightfall to get these photographs.

We could see it in the day and clearly they were right about fumes.

It got much more impressive as it got darker.

The real eruption started about a month later, destroying houses and land and building new land.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: molten.