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We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love's light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.    famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/maya_angelou/poems/496

"In Africa," Mama Penny explained, "often the names we give our children stand for something. For example, my grandson's name is Rapala. It means 'pray.'" https://www.tyndale.com/p/beaded-hope/

All night an accelerating geometry of eyes—hundreds shaped like birds or boats or beetles, simplified to dots or crosses or a pair of 2s or mis- matched diamonds, perfect zeros, scoops of moon placed sidewise or lengthwise on a face, slipping out of orbit on a cheek, hung under an ear, planted mid-forehead, paper-thin planes of them, each one alive and staring from the dislocated faces of wives, lovers, mothers, serene and lopsided, splintered, wrenching, ravaged, a proliferating gallery of women, terraced in my head as I sleep, and my own curious eye: steering toward what it perceives, capturing exact duplicates of each stylized eye I run by, as I race to comprehend what I'm taking in, what expression I'd see if I raised the mirror to find my own eye, distorted and floating above an iron cheek. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58621/dreaming-of-picasso?utm_

Down by the Riverside         Ain't goin study war no more         Ain't goin study war no more         Ain't goin study war no more During the time Daddy was becoming Dad, the armies and armies of green plastic soldiers went on with their wars, my empire of the private grown. Walter Cronkite tallied each day's casualties, and my soldiers named themselves Americans or Viet Cong; they zipped themselves up in long full bags or lay about without their arms and legs. My soldiers bloodied themselves with our garden's mud, and they did so under orders from the eight-year-old sergeant whose father had not been home in months. And since I had not seen him, even in the crowds laughing at Bob Hope jokes, a new crowd each new place, I commanded that the Army needed chaplains more than sergeants, and the next Sunday I joined church, begged God to help me lay down burdens and bring Dad home; and that day I baptized each of my soldiers in large garden puddles, blessed

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"Villages are like people, we approach them slowly, a step of a time." --Jose' Saramago, Journey to Portugal

" "You would think it would be impossible to find anything new in the world, creatures no man has ever seen before, one-of-a-kind oddities in which nature has taken a backseat to the coursing pulse of the fantastical and the marvelous." https://www.rosecityreader.com/ I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the      beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.  Walt Whitman, Song of Myself