Hello February! Poem: Best Time of Day (au matin) - Jiving with Nas

BEST TIME OF DAY

Am sitting in my office
reading this morning's Times.
The sky is awake, barely,
a soft blue found
in certain bird's eggs
in the jungles of Costa Rica.

And the sea of branches
waving in the backyard.
Like huge Tinker Toys
or pick-up sticks.
Sad that Castro's
first-born son
killed himself, too
distraught to even
think. I'll tune out
the world by returning
to bed and staring at
the brightening world
until I have the gall
to wake up.



***

Eleven minutes before the hip hop star Nas appears on Great Performances on Channel 12. Hold on while I run upstairs to turn on the TV.

Okay, we've got three minutes left.

***
 Very bad news: 16 children dead from the flu and the peak isn't here yet. View here.

A friend of mine who lives around the corner has a bad case of the flu.

It was too late for me to send her a card. This was around 3pm.

So I used a stamped postcard from the post office, of which I have about a dozen left.

     This, with the tree, is not the "fanciful flowers" I sent. But I put a chipper message on it that'll make her feel good. Was gonna stick a can of soup in her mailbox but thought, What if she doesn't like this kind of soup?

***
The Nas concert is over. Okay, I'm in the audience, craning my head to see The Man. I've got red hair and am wearing my beret over it, as I am now.

Such energy in the JFK Performing Center. I particularly enjoy Nas telling us about the 20 years it took to get him here.

He was raised in the projects of New York City. How blessed he was to be in the city of the poor, with the rats and the drugs and the killings and seeing his friend with his face shot off and all the blood and he said it was like being in Vietnam. All the horrors and the trauma.

  He dug playing with the National Symphony Orchestra. So, I'm in the audience, right, and I'm noshing on some anise-flavored pizzells they sold at the food counter.

So good, so crisp, so light-weight.

Check out this lumination about tonight's concert. Click here. 



Okay, good night y'all. And get all warm under those covers as the temperature right now is
twenty-one.

Moon out yet?

A nice full one, round as an apple.