IF...

 If you can keep your head when all about you

   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

   But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

   Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

   If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

   Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

-Rudyard Kipling

Haiku 113

 

To The Swimmer

 

Now as I watch you, strong of arm and endurance, 

battling and struggling

With the waves that rush against you, 

ever with invincible strength returning

Into my heart, grown each day more tranquil and peaceful, 

comes a fierce longing

Of mind and soul that will not be appeased until, like you, 

I breast yon deep and boundless expanse of blue.

With an outward stroke of power intense your mighty arm goes forth,

Cleaving its way through waters that rise and roll, 

ever a ceaseless vigil keeping

Over the treasures beneath.

My heart goes out to you of dauntless courage and spirit indomitable,

And though my lips would speak, my spirit forbids me to ask,

“Is your heart as true as your arm?”

- COUNTEE CULLEN

Mood

 

Haiku 112

“No good news awaits

I warned you right at the start

Turn away, reader”

― Rick Riordan, The Burning Maze

Volume One

 “to live in this world

you must be able

to do three things

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go”

― Mary Oliver

01.04.2021

 

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible

 is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

― Arthur C. Clarke