A Boy’s Head

(Photo by Vivian Maier, 1926-2009, American “street
photographer,” from a collection of tens of thousands
of photographs she took on the streets of mid-century
Chicago; her work was discovered when a real estate
agent found the negatives in 2007 at an auction of boxes
abandoned in storage lockers)

“Recall that the imagination is a natural faculty in man. Some people make the mistake of fostering it, but it is often so powerful on its own that it will assert itself if we simply allow people to live what used to pass for an ordinary life. If you are breathing hard from the airborne soot of a city, all it may take for your lungs to clear again is to spend a week in the country. And all it might take for the imagination to breathe again is some time in solitude and silence.” ~ Anthony Esolen, from his book Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

A BOY’S HEAD

In it there is a space-ship
and a project
for doing away with piano lessons.

And there is
Noah’s ark,
which shall be first.

And there is
an entirely new bird,
an entirely new hare,
an entirely new bumble-bee.

There is a river
that flows upwards.

There is a multiplication table.

There is anti-matter.

And it just cannot be trimmed.

I believe
that only what cannot be trimmed
is a head.

There is much promise
in the circumstance
that so many people have heads.

~ Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), Czech poet