Lady Lavender

Foxglove in a Washington, D.C. garden
She came sailing in —
foxgloved murder digitalis
among shape-shifters in ash-colored silk
an Austen novel in her head
drysalter’s pharmacopœia of prurience
in everyone else’s closet Gothic
pawned in a room of Macbeths
unshriven, exhumed desire
— sailing in, lighting torches
blanketed fire,
lavender swan.
At d’Verse Sarah asked us to write a Quadrille of 44 words using the word "Ash." 
This is a reworking of an earlier poem.
Click on Mr. Linky to read more.

A Common-Place Jotting: Macbeth Act V, Scene 3

Common-Place or “Locus Communis” a place to remember

Orson Welles directed and starred as the titular Macbeth in the 1948 film, with Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth.

Two moving speeches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, both in the same scene:

one a soliloquy on his own fate . . .

I have lived long enough: My way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

. . . the other lamenting a physician’s lack of cure for his wife’s guilt-worn sanity —

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

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