Wednesday, September 12, 2007

A heroine

This week I've greatly lamented the loss of one of my favorite authors of all time, and one of my primary inspirations: Madeleine L'Engle. I've done it privately. But today I saw on Jennifer Jackson's blog this poem:

At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place between myself and the powers of darkness!

I memorized this poem, when I was an early teen, and repeated it to myself whenever I had troubles. I read the book again as a young adult in college, and I renewed the memorization, checking myself every few days for a while to see if I had it still, because I wanted to keep it in my head. Because it, and those books, were so important to me. They still are. They always will be.

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