Louise Glück: Spring comes quickly, overnight the plum tree blossoms (Primavera)

“Primavera”; a poem celebrating spring from Louise Gluck 2006 poetry collection “A Village Life”. The motifs such as plum tree blossoming and birds singing are something dear and near to me at the moment because spring is indeed here and with it comes joy and lightness of life. I especially love the second to last line which describes the blossoms as the emblems of the resiliance of life. Trees, and the rest of nature, have their time to bloom and flourish just as they have their time to shed their leaves and let their branches be bare. They don’t resist it and they always have hope. Our lives too are made of seasons and even if we feel that our lives are in a spiritual state of winter – spring of the soul will inevitably follow.

Renoir, Young Woman with a Japanese Umbrella, 1876

Primavera

Spring comes quickly: overnight
the plum tree blossoms,
the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun
with rays coming out all around
but because the background is dirt, the sun is black.
There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends
a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are—emblems of the resilience of life.
The birds approach eagerly.

Lonely Birthday Pictures – A Pretty Doll in a Victorian House

I recently discovered these fashion pictures taken by Louis Park for Vogue Korea, March 2006 called “Lonely Birthday”. The model is Sophie Buxton. The mood and the aesthetic of these photographs is fun, whimsical and dreamy and fills my mind with ideas and fragments of stories. I wonder who this doll-like girl is and what is she like? I imagine she lives all alone in that strange brick Victorian house with a grand entrance and decaying flaking walls. I imagine this girl lives in her own strange Alice in Wonderland kind of world with porcelain dolls, old floral wallpapers, fallen chairs, cake and tea, and no intruders. I imagine her as a childlike creature who feeds birds with cake-crumbs, listens to murmur of the trees and befriends mice from the attic of her lonely Victorian mansion, I imagine that she lives in a perpetual tea party to which none but her porcelain dolls are invited. I also imagine that I would like to be her.

“Lonely Birthday”, Vogue Girl Korea, Photographer: Louis Park, Model: Sophie Buxton