Artist's Almanac: July 2010

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You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4th,
not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House
in a show of strength and muscle,
but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees,
the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.
You may think you have overeaten,
but it is patriotism.

- Erma Bombeck

We celebrate July this month with a collection of poetry by several and paintings by the artist that seek to distill the essence of the month and of our rich, free land in print and in paint.

O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountains majesty
Above thy fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

- Katherine Bates

Loud is the summer's busy song
The smallest breeze can find a tongue,
While insects of each tiny size
Grow teasing with their melodies,
Till noon burns with its blistering breath
Around, and day lies still as death."

- John Clare, July

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

- Lewis Grizzard

Summer has set in with its usual severity

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Winter is an etching, spring is a watercolor,
summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.

- Stanley Horowitz

A break in the heat
away from the front
no thunder, no lightning,
just rain, warm rain
falling near dusk
falling on eager ground
steaming blacktop
hungry plants
thirsty
turning toward the clouds
cooling, soothing rain
splashing in sudden puddles
catching in open screens
that certain smell
of summer rain

- Raymond A. Foss, Summer Rain

The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.

- Hanna Rion

The hearts that love will know never winter's frost and chill.
Summer's warmth is in them still.

- Eben Eugene Rexford

And lastly, something I could not paint, except in words: a memory of those July nights with the katydids singing in the grove above as we sat together on the patio listening to the night birds and peering into the Milky Way glowing overhead.

As when, upon a trancèd summer-night
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmèd by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.

- John Keats, Hyperion: A Fragment

    
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