From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee

May Birthdays

May 3 Niccolo Machiavelli (Italian, born 1469)
May 5 Soren Kierkegaard (Danish, born 1813) and Karl Marx (German, born 1818)
May 7 David Hume (British, born 1711)
May 9 Jose Ortega y Gasset (Spanish, born 1883)
May 18 Joseph Butler (British, born 1692), Rudolf Carnap (German, born 1891), and Bertrand Russell (British, born 1872)
May 19 Johann Gottlieb Fichte (German, born 1762)
May 20 John Stuart Mill (British, born 1806) and Wilfrid Sellars (American, born 1912)
May 21 Rudolph Hermann Lotze (German, born 1817)
May 23 Sarah Margaret Fuller (American, born 1810)
May 24 William Whewell (British, born 1794)
May 25 Ralph Waldo Emerson (American, born 1803)
May 30 Mikhael Bakunin (Russian, born 1814)
May 31 Henry Sidgwick (British, born 1838)