Big Blue, swimming with "yes"

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I thank you God for this most amazing day, 

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, 

and for the blue dream of sky 

and for everything which is natural, 

which is infinite, which is yes.

~ e. e. cummings

The last post was a bit of No.

When you’re a child, you want what you want, freely, if you’re lucky. But somehow, sometime you learn not to want everything that you want. Because someone says NO. Then, when you hear No often enough, after a while you start to say it yourself. Pretty soon it's your first response to a lot of things. You even say it before the question is asked, before the want is wanted. I hate to say it, but for some, it even becomes their favorite word.

There’s a woman whose life seems to be the answer Yes. (My favorite word.) Shelley Gill was at Don’s school last week, and he said she was the most inspiring assembly speaker he’s heard; the kids thought so too.

What Shelley always wanted was Alaska and a dog. When she turned 18 she moved from Florida to Alaska with $14. With her $14 she bought a husky dog. Years later she became one of the first women to compete in the 1,100 mile dog sled race, the Iditarod.

When Shelley Gill's daughter Kye was nine, she wanted: To swim with a Blue Whale. She knew all about them, because her mom had been working to protect them, driving a whale-research boat, hanging out with marine biologists. Though there were once at least 200,000 and maybe as many as 400,000 of them swimming in the waters of the world, by the 1960s blue whales were on the verge of extinction because of hunting practices. As you may know, the blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived on earth. Bigger than dinosaurs. A blue whale’s heart is as big as a VW Beetle. She eats 4 to 8 tons of krill a day. A blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant.

National Geographic says:

Blue whales are baleen whales, which means they have fringed plates of fingernail-like material, called baleen, attached to their upper jaws. The giant animals feed by first gulping an enormous mouthful of water, expanding the pleated skin on their throat and belly to take it in. Then the whale's massive tongue forces the water out through the thin, overlapping baleen plates. Thousands of krill are left behind—and then swallowed.

Shelley Gill in Alaska

Did mother Shelley Gill say No to Kye, that no one could swim with such a creature? You might be sucked into that cavernous mouth like the little krill!

No. They traveled thousands of miles down the coast from Alaska to Baja, Mexico. They took a little boat quietly out on the Pacific, to a spot where blue whales range within one hundred yards of shore (the same place where 29,000 were hunted and killed in one winter season in 1932). But every time the boat approached, the blue whale would pull farther away. Finally the boatman said, “I think you’re just gonna have to jump out of the boat and into the water.”

They did. The boat left them in their snorkel gear treading water, and the blue whale slowly glided up to them. Blue mama nudged and hovered. Kye reached out and touched the skin near the whale's eye that's the size of her soccer ball. They gazed at each other, eyes to eye. "Time stops. This moment belongs to Big Blue and me. I twirl like a manta ray in her surge, dancing in the depths of her deep, blue sea." They played and swam a surreal ballet, a human girl and her mom with the largest animal that has ever lived, because the girl wanted to. That's the book Shelly Gill wrote about it at the top of the post: Big Blue.

Photograph by Flip Nicklin, National Geographic

 detail of Anne Barrow's illustration of Kye swimming with a blue whale

image found here

photo found here

image found here

photo found here

I imagine that yes is the only living thing. 

~ e. e. cummings

Watch and listen to Sir David Attenborough talk about this magnificent creature, the blue whale, and find out how long she can stay under water without coming up for air.

Then fill your ears and heart with some fresh Yes from Richie Havens, who still knocks me out forty-one years after Woodstock with "Freedom" (my second favorite word), his improvisation on the Negro Spiritual "Motherless Child."

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Poem: To be an inanimate object

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To be an inanimate object

Enough of mind, and heart.
Someone turn me off.

Pack the story into a deep, arid trunk.
Don’t write any more in fluid ink.

Siphon the dark running river to put out the sun.
Cut out the moon like the bottom of a tin can.

Fix the bolts, tighten each hinge, hang me on a nail.
Let the dust that floats down be the poem.

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Poem: Four Crows

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Four Crows:
between winter and spring

The white blanket’s thrown off.
Meadow grass is flattened and combed like hair,
sore with winter, and wise with sleep.

A phoebe imitates a man imitating a phoebe.
Goldenrod stubble pokes up like tossed hangers.
A dry ball of hydrangea tumbles to the barn.

Why didn’t Doe eat it, in such a winter as this?
O her hoof prints are gone now, though I invite
them with my longing eyes

around tree roots that look like arms and legs
lounging in new green bed covers of moss, and the litter
of Russian olive leaves like a thousand just-opened eyes.

Umber pine needles are arrows, and four crows,
suddenly rising up at my approach, point in her direction,
which is everywhere, and nowhere.

My entry for One Shot Wednesday. Follow the link and discover new work by wonderful poets.

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Nouvelle 55: The Girl by the Window

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The Girl by the Window, 1893
by Edvard Munch

Art Institute of Chicago

The Girl by the Window

Afraid, gulping bitterness,
she padded to the windowed moonlight,
to see if it were really so.

“You see? She is leaving. Look at her trunk.”
Grandmother’s voice was a triumph, like a horn.
Grandmother didn’t know her own trunk
was packed for just such a night as this.

She was afraid she would never leave.

This is my first nouvelle 55, a flash fiction.

I wonder if you're like me at the moment. My attention span is shorter than ever. I feel restless. I can barely make it through a news article or op-ed without feeling that there is something else I should be doing, thinking or saying. Living in the moment, this moment, now, has never been more difficult. Strangely though, yesterday I read longer in War & Peace than I have up until now, go figure. I had my laptop open, looking up facts about the Napoleonic Wars. I couldn't get enough. Tolstoy's beautiful writing, where I ride each sentence like I'm tubing a slow-moving river, kept me riveted for hours. It also inspired me to write fiction. Very, very short fiction.

Flash fiction, micro fiction, what the French call nouvelle. Steve Moss challenged people to write them in 55 words, no more, no less. I'm in the mood for Paris, so I made up this genre: nouvelle 55, which is flash fiction, based on a piece of art, in 55 words. This particular nouvelle 55 is a meditation on Edvard Munch's painting "The Girl by the Window." I'd love it if you'd try one. There are helpful tips for micro fiction at Heelstone here. Go ahead, find a piece of art for inspiration, and write a nouvelle 55.

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The River and the Moon

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I walked along the river at noon.
The trunks of tall black trees stood their ground
along the banks, while the river pulled backward.
On I walked up current, toward the river’s past.

I thought of the moon, a world away, invisible.
I walked and thought how different
my life would be without her, how the world
would come loose at its edges. I wanted her,

the way I want my mother’s face, knowing full well
her time is past. We scatter our petals into flowing water,
loving the mystery of disappearance. They say
that tonight she will return, oh so close, larger even, than life.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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My coat

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My coat is not big enough

for the body of the world.

But it is too big for me alone.

The sleeves hang like bells,

my arms ringing for someone to hold.

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Seamus Heaney: "Digging" in Ireland

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Portrait of Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), by Peter Edwards

National Portrait Gallery, London;
I have a postcard of this painting
taped to my file cabinet at work.

For St. Patrick's Day stores are sprouting plastic shamrocks, a paltry substitute for the island rock of green that grows deep down in many of us, even if we're not Irish: green and purple hills, icy lakes, soft woolen caps, pocked stone fences and crosses, rain on the roof, a fiddle, a fire on the hearth, a glass of stout, a never-ending talker on the other side of the table, an old history of pain and struggle, faith, and writing. A smile, a song and a lament.

Poet Seamus Heaney is a lighthouse in an island country cultivated with literary lighthouses. He was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, and many of his poems are rooted there in the rural countryside of his childhood. I just love this one, one of his most famous, about his father the digger. See how he alludes to a gun, which was a familiar and ugly character in the Northern Ireland of his youth. In the YouTube video is a montage of clips in which he recites "Digging" in many different venues, at different ages, with different timbres in his voice. Think of that. One life, one family, one man, one poet, who harvests and feeds us riches like this, in and out of just one poem. Oh my dear friends, the world in one person! See the spade and hear it slide into the wet dirt. Smell the iron, the wet steel, the potato mold. Feel the hands of father and son, one with a shovel and one with a pen. Hear the pen, Heaney's shovel, that digs for sustenance, and replants it too, to come up for us again and again, like Swift, Wilde, Beckett, Lewis, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and a lot of other pen-diggers. (There are no women in my list, for I have not studied Irish women writers, but here is a list to explore; no doubt you could help me too.)

After the video, I've lined up my own St. Patrick's Day parade of photos taken over two summers, 2006 and 2007, while I helped students traipse around Dublin, Killarney and Cork. I have not been to Northern Ireland, or I would share scenes from those counties. Six out of thirty-two Irish counties are in Northern Ireland. As you probably already know, Southern Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, now known as the Republic of Ireland, and is no longer part of the United Kingdom. I knew Ireland as the Celtic Tiger in the mid 2000s high-tech boom, but now, Ireland has the highest ratio of household debt relative to income of any developed country in the world. I really feel for those young families who thought prosperity would last forever. As Roger Cohen recently said, maybe it's time for "emotional prosperity" since the financial kind is becoming a thing of the past for many of us.

Digging

   by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

 Students on study abroad program, Cork

Graveyard on the Hill of Slane, site of St. Patrick's Paschal Fire

County Meath, Ireland

Killarney National Park

County Kerry

 Residential neighborhood
Kinsale, County Cork

 Cork, County Cork

Kinsale, County Cork

 Trinity College, Dublin, County Dublin

 Killarney National Park
County Cork
The sheeps' heads are red, not because they are Irish redheads, 
or because they are bleeding, but they are marked by their owners

 Killarney National Park
County Cork

 Street in Cobh, County Cork

Window in Cork, County Cork

 Blarney Castle, County Cork

Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin

 My dear friend of the mind-heart, Inge,
at Four Knocks, the 5000 year-old passage tomb
in County Meath; Inge taught on the study abroad program

Me, photographed by Inge, who taught in the program in 2007,
looking at abstract art in the 5000 year-old passage tomb
at Four Knocks, County Meath

Beech tree in the church yard at Tara
County Meath

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Disaster, and why we write

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When the economy tanked two and a half years ago, the magnitude of it didn’t hit me for a couple of weeks, until the Chair of my English department gathered us for the first faculty meeting of fall term. He told us the university had changed forever. Not just our university. He meant that The University as an entity had changed and might never be the same again. He proceeded to describe how the bottom had fallen out of our graduate program, how state funds that had already thinned dramatically, would shrink even more. Some graduate programs across the country would disappear. The question of how to prevent that happening to our own program sat in the room like a cannon ball. For most academic departments, the graduate research program is the driving reason for existence, which is true of ours.

The air was knocked out of me for a couple of days. I couldn’t recall when my outlook on life had ever shifted as dramatically as I felt it at that moment. I continued to advise undergraduate students, but as fear took hold of me, I felt little enthusiasm for the future state of their education. Some students had to drop out of school mid-term as parents lost jobs and their own personal funds disappeared.

After numbly getting through a couple of days advising students, my conversations with them began to shift. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth: “You must write through this.” Like light through the Venetian blinds of my 100-year-old ten-foot office window, something hopeful striped the room as the prospect of writing stories about the suffering and loss that lay ahead of us began to dawn. No matter how dire things would get, we could turn it into a thing of beauty by writing essays, short stories, poems, or screenplays. Even pain can be beautiful.

When cataclysmic events happen in the world, I don’t know how to be. In his "Love Song" Rilke wrote that he would “gladly lodge” his soul “with lost objects in the dark, / in some far still place / that does not tremble when you tremble.” I would gladly protect my soul like that too, but how is it possible to live isolated from tragedy when it happens?

When the earth trembled itself ten inches off its axis, water swept over the lip of Japan’s coast, and the nuclear power plant exploded in Sendai, Inge and I were at the lake cottage on a two-day writing retreat, discussing among other things, the question: Why do we write?

Over the hours some answers came:

• to remember
• to think
• to feel
• to claim an experience as my own
• to meditate and connect with my soul

Ray Bradbury said that you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Catherine Drinker Bowen said Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

John K. Hutchens said, A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

Truman Capote said, To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. 


The second stanza of Rilke’s "Love Song":

. . . all that touches us, you and me,
plays us together, like the bow of a violin
that from two strings draws forth one voice.
On what instrument are we strung?
What musician is playing us?
Oh sweet song.

Why do I write? To find the points of light in my experience. When we write, those points of light are notes of inner music our words make. When layered with voices of other writers and artists across the terrain of the world, it becomes a fugue, a galaxy of points of light. Have a listen to Robert Tiso play Bach's Toccato and Fugue in D minor on his glass harp. The four-voice fugue written for organ, played on this remarkable "instrument", is but one individual's expression of his own light, and of Bach's. Can you also hear layers of other voices streaming in their light?

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What is faith?

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It's there, hiding, across the Red Cedar River,
under trees, behind the couple walking

Professor Ellison looked even older than he was. He was tall, like Ichabod Crane, lanky, bony, with disheveled gray hair, goatee, and always with enthusiastic drool at the corners of his mouth as he talked fast, but his spirit and enthusiasm were as youthful as any of the college students he taught freshman composition.

His office was next to mine all the way at the end of the long corridor in Wonders Hall. His department had moved him to our wing from his secluded corner of an old building, because they were afraid he might die and no one would find him for days.

But they couldn’t have known him as I came to know him. Seven years in the 1990s I worked as an administrative assistant (secretary) next door to Professor Ellison. His bountiful and energetic joy radiated to all of us who encountered him while he came in for his brief office hours twice a week. What a relief from the stony, dour insolence of some professors. Some students and colleagues found him merely laughable when he rode his old English bicycle with a makeshift basket to campus and to class from his office, wiry gray hair splayed from under his helmet, and even more so on the days he strapped on roller blades. Even I didn’t know whether to laugh in glee, weep in poignancy, or cheer Whoopeee! when I saw him teeter-walk like a toddler plodding, not gliding, on those roller blades down the carpeted hall after dousing his hair under the stream of water from the drinking fountain and mopping it from his head with his sleeves. “Hellooo, Ruuuth!” he crooned as he cautiously leaned on, felt and stepped his hands along the wall, supporting himself all the way to me at our end of the hall as if I were his female trapeze artist partner waiting for him, urging him on, while drool or drinking fountain water ran down his cheeks and chin. His eyes flickered and twinkled like blinking lights at the county fair on those wild and spider-leggy rides. His smile never disappeared, a foul word never dropped from his lips.

It just so happened that it was in those days that I began taking classes to finish my BA via the generous educational assistance offered at my university to secretaries and other union members. I got to take fourteen credits a year for free. I began with two American Lit classes, reading Hawthorne, Irving, Cooper. On I waded deep across the Atlantic into Brit Lit and Conrad, Joyce and Woolf. Finally I came to poetry writing and five classes with Diane Wakoski. I worked on poems on my lunch hour and off and on through the workday tweaking a word here and there, surrounded by inspirational poems from Bishop, Blake, Williams and Bukowski I’d printed and taped on the wall in front of my desk and on the file cabinet. It was a time in my life journey of great spiritual searching and angst, which got written into my poems, a time of losing faith, and hoping to find it again. The writing was the door I went through, the room where I could light altar candles in front of old statues of the past, and whisper chilled prayers for my nearly hollow soul.

Professor Ellison was ceaselessly interested in my class work. We were very fond of each other, plus I was a nontraditional (older) student, unlike his first year freshmen he taught writing, and he eagerly asked first thing every morning about the critical analysis papers I was writing for English classes. He taught me to stop writing I think . . . and just write my thoughts directly. What I write is obviously what I think! As I moved into poetry writing, he was my main reader besides Don, and what a help he was. He didn’t know my story as Don did, and so he was the objective reader every writer needs, to tell you if they “get it” just from your words on the page.

One day, I sat at my desk doing something or other, and Prof. Ellison poked his head in the door with his bright, moist cheer, “Ruth! Have you seen the aconite?!”

“The wha?”

“Aconite, winter aconite! It’s blooming over by the river!”

After his pleasant dismay that I had never heard of nor witnessed this precious secret, Professor Ellison educated me about the tiny yellow flower that grows on vines close to the ground under a tree over by the Red Cedar River, in the Beal garden created and named for the famous botanist Professor William J. Beal. It first pokes its yellow blooms up through snow in February. I promised him I would check it out.

This photo was taken

two years ago in February,

when rain had melted the snow

I did, and there it was, a yellow and green surprise alive in the snow, first sign of spring. It inspired a poem, a little haiku, which I turned in for class, and happily Professor Wakoski thought it was successful. For me, this haiku and its title “Faith,” symbolizes an important turning point in my life, from leaving the religious faith of my past that had darkened into a long winter of confining and frustrating emptiness. As I learned to write, with the generous contributions of three professors, something eternal began to sprout.

Yesterday I walked over from my office (in the English department where I graduated) to the river to find aconite again, and there it was, the same small answer, like my poem.

Faith

Faith is aconite

rising in February

warm in the snow bed.

These photos were taken yesterday.

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Meditation: Corner of a table

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Still Life: Corner of a Table, by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1873
Art Institute of Chicago

The following poem is not a judgment on this gorgeous painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, who is famous for paintings of flower arrangements. It is just a meditation prompted by the painting, that went off in a certain direction, deflected by a splinter in my head. As much as I love wabi-sabi pine, earthenware and distressed linen, I also love silver, crystal, damask and mahogany. And wine? Yes. And the yellow of lemons or pears that smiles upon us in a room when outside March rains darken the sky. I do love magnificence like this. It just becomes less savory knowing that not all can taste it. I know this is a bit heavy again. Don't worry, I don't feel morose, and I hope it doesn't make you feel that. As Shaista reminded me of Paul Simon's words in her comment in the last post, which was a reminder from my post before that, These are the days of miracle and wonder. Keep the cycle going.

Enough

A meditation on the painting "Still Life: Corner of a Table"

by Henri Fantin-Latour

Spare me the entire
table spread like a paragraph
of Henry James
unpacked from a sea-going trunk

Don't even think that presenting
just the princess sugar bowl, arms butterflied
and head dropping in shyness, will not be too much

And god no,
not the full
goblet of wine, so blood-rich it has all but disappeared
into the genealogy of the glass

Hide, please hide
the vinegar cruet
better than that
I can’t bear its amber-gold liquidity!

What do you mean
exposing the skins of those plump lemons
as if the white compote
lessened them with her modesty?

What do you think
the empty elegance of a cup and saucer
on glimmering damask

can do to transcend the lace
of rhododendrons
like foam from waves of the sea

reaching up to wash
the fruits and bones and porcelain sand
from the table

all under a furtive crescent moon
peering from her crystal pitcher of Bordeaux
I beg you

spare me all
but the empty corner of a frame
on a dirt-brown wall

We have had quite enough
magnificence for a century or two
And by "we" I mean just us here
at this corner of the table

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Listen to Joni Mitchell sing "Banquet" from her 1972 album "For the Roses" in the Grooveshark widget below the lyrics, about the imbalance of greed and need on our planet.

Banquet

by Joni Mitchell

Come to the dinner gong

The table is laden high

Fat bellies and hungry little ones

Tuck your napkins in

And take your share

Some get the gravy

And some get the gristle

Some get the marrow bone

And some get nothing

Though there's plenty to spare

I took my share down by the sea

Paper plates and Javex bottles on the tide

Seagulls come down and they squawk at me

Down where the water skiers glide

Some turn to Jesus

And some turn to heroin

Some turn to rambling round

Looking for a clean sky

And a drinking stream

Some watch the paint peel off

Some watch their kids grow up

Some watch their stocks and bonds

Waiting for that big deal American Dream

I took my dream down by the sea

Yankee yachts and lobster pots and sunshine

And logs and sails

And Shell Oil pails

Dogs and tugs and summertime

Back in the banquet line

Angry young people crying

Who let the greedy in

And who left the needy out

Who made this salty soup

Tell him we're very hungry now

For a sweeter fare

In the cookie I read

"Some get the gravy

And some get the gristle

Some get the marrow bone

And some get nothing

Though there's plenty to spare

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The almost unbearable weight of love

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I read a friend's post about losing a baby to miscarriage at ten weeks. Her love for the baby she barely knew surmounted what some would imagine, and others might try to comfort away ("thankfully you already have three children . . . "). It brought to mind my daughter's best friend, who learned early in her pregnancy that the infant inside her had anencephaly, the cephalic disorder that prevents the brain developing. There is nothing anyone can do to help the baby survive once she's born, and they usually do go full term, depending on the mother for survival. Lesley's friend named her daughter, carried her in her womb the rest of the months to term, loved her, gave birth with her husband touching her wherever he could, and they held their daughter for a couple of hours until she passed away. I believe that it is possible to distill a full lifetime's love into a short span like that. What is time?

You've probably read about the sixteen-year-old boy who shot the final basket to win the varsity basketball game in Fennville, Michigan, and just after he was carried on the shoulders of his teammates and the crowd surrounded him with hysteria, suddenly, he paled, collapsed. And he died. Fennville is the high school where my siblings and I would have attended if my parents hadn't moved to a different town an hour and a half away shortly before I entered the world. My sister's granddaughter is student teaching in Fennville this year. Wes was in her school, where stunningly, with one missed heartbeat, he won't be Monday morning. We are throwing her a bridal shower tomorrow, for she is marrying a nice fellow named Jeff in May. Tomorrow in our celebration with Katy toward her new life with Jeff, we will also carry the weight of this too-soon-gone sixteen-year-old.

I think we are all mothers at times like this. Whatever our gender or childbearing ability, we carry the weight of a child, as Anne Michaels said in her powerful novel, Fugitive Pieces:

"There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child."

Sometimes love itself feels this way. Love is almost a grief in its timelessness, ever constrained by the weight of gravity and distance. Even the separation of skin is is almost too much to bear.

 

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Woman in Pajamas Walks on Water

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These are the days of miracle and wonder . . .  ~ Paul Simon

It fell for days and days, the snow. In the colder cold, it was down feathers, or the powder in my mother’s plastic Coty bowl, from where she doused her puff and smoothed it onto the velvet petals of her cheeks, chin, nose and forehead. I feel the silk of her good-night kiss. And smell her: freesia.

This is the habitat of the deer.

We weigh the same, the young doe and I, when she is not with child. I will never be with child again, but in this moment, we walk the same path. Next year, a fawn will come to her, from her, out of her, under her, and quickly learn to walk around her! This is how we rise and fall.

But today, I am the one who walks on water. See, her hoof inserts itself into the glove of snow. But not mine.

With March come warmer days, still cold nights, and freezing rain. The footprints the deer and I had left become crusted in frozen traps of treachery, enough to twist an ankle. Today, the surface next to our tracks is solid, and my human feet in boots skip across it like white lightning on the horizon in summer. But not the doe’s. See how her hoof inserts itself into the glove of winter, and kisses the ground.

Which of us is not a miracle?

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby, don't cry

Don't cry

    ~ from "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon

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