Why don’t adults get summer vacation? It’s simply not fair at all, and it is definitely one of the many, many reasons why growing up is a scam, right up there with property taxes and pap smears.
In honor of Fourth of July being a federal holiday, I will choose to take a well-deserved break from my weekly thought-provoking columns. I should (mentally) be back next week, assuming that there is something cool for me to talk about. Love Island USA seems to be heating up the television water cooler talk nowadays–even if your office, like mine, doesn’t actually have a water cooler. (The Bryan County News probably should invest in one at this rate; Georgia ain’t getting any colder!)
In the meanwhile, please enjoy some quality poetry from writers much more talented than I. And Happy Fourth.
America. Walt Whitman
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
After Apple-Picking, Robert Frost
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep.
Andrea Gutierrez is the editor of the Bryan County News.