Keats and Fanny

Now hold on just a darn minute. I see the month of May is nearly over and I'm not ready to say goodbye. I want it back. May has been good to me and I would like to do it all over again.
For instance: In the sky the swallows are swooping and spinning. Climbing roses have topped the garden with squishy pink clouds, and in the studio I am making Boombah pieces again. Like the two rabbits above, "Keats and Fanny" in honor of the English poet and his true love.

This shadow box is nearly ten and a half inches tall. It qualifies as a boombah too. The lady reaches up to a passing bluebird, who flies by with a heart in its beak. The word 'away' is written on the heart and there is her small suitcase too, just out of camera shot. The moon looks down on the whole scene.

But looking forward, June has good things brewing too. Fresh cherries, apricots and baseball games. Migrating pelicans, birthdays to celebrate and talk of a tea party at a friends wonderful house close by. So we will have to let May go. And one of these days, just like a dear friend, May will come visit us again.

xx

julie

juliewhitmorepottery.etsy.com

passionate poet

I made this shadow box because I revere the poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Faith and doubt in God is what he's known for, but I've always seen almost a holy reverence for nature in his words. When you read him, you can almost hear him breathing in the room, winded from one of his lengthy trapses in the wood. This stanza is from 'Insvernaid' written about 1880.

What would the world be, once bereft of wildness and wet?
Let them be left, oh let them be left,
Wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

This outdoor loving woman is standing on a rock while the river rushes by her. A speckled trout has jumped into her arms. Birds fly overhead and water rats hold everything aloft.

Gerald, who suffered from depression, but fought it bravely died of typhoid fever in 1875. His last words "I am happy, so happy."