Carrots, peppers, and cucumbers are coming in strong right now. Every day I pick a handful of strawberries and blueberries, and green beans are opening a second wave of blossoms. Nonetheless, the weather remains difficult. We're readying for another brutal day, heat-wise, and now the weather service has just put us under a tropical-storm watch. I am exhausted by the endless humidity, the twilight sleep; and while we need the rain desperately, a torrential windstorm is not just what I'm hoping for. Oh, well.

Anyway: Monday again. The house is clean and neat. I'm starting a new editing project this morning.  For some reason the state department of labor has decided to start issuing me unemployment checks again, after refusing to do so for six weeks, so I guess we'll be able to afford to pay for some new wiring. I'll be talking to Teresa this afternoon about Blake. I'm working on curriculum for an online writing retreat focusing on the work of Jane Kenyon and Hayden Carruth. At 3 a.m. a possum was sitting on our front stoop.

Here's some Shelley for you, to stoke your anger and frustration. Two hundred years later, what's changed?

England in 1819

Percy Bysshe Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.