We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming…

…for a brief MeMe brought to us by walternatives: The Nearest Book MeMe.

The rules are simple:

1) Find the nearest book
2) Open to page 123
3) Type lines 6-8 of said book
4) Tag three others

I had a bit of a hiccup in the process because I realized that my actual nearest book–nearest four books–only went to pages 75-100…they are poetry collections and because people in this rag-tag culture of ours don’t read poetry (AHEM!!!), they aren’t long. But then I realized I had a Bilingual edition (so, already twice as long), of the collected poems of Pablo Neruda nearby:

And those of you who know me won’t believe this, but here are the first eight lines from page 123, a poem entitled “Disaction”:

The dove is filled with split papers,
its breast is stained with erasers and weeks,
with blotting paper whiter than a corpse
and inks frightened by their sinister color.

Come with me to the shadow of administrations,
to the weak, delicate, pallid color of the chiefs,
to the tunnels deep as calendars,
to the doleful thousand-paged wheel.

So, besides the bird reference and the obvious writing references, does the line “the tunnels deep as calendars” remind anyone else out there of this interminable adoption wait?

Okay, I am tagging The Slow Boat to China, atomic mama, and omega mom.

Have Fun!