They Might Be Giants

Hey hovering sombrero

Gently waving in the air above the meadow

Softly floating in the sky outside the window

Hovering sombrero don’t be shy

Don’t… don’t be shy

Don’t be… terrified



When you take yourself for granted

Feel rejected and unwanted

Know you’re never just a hat

You’re never only just a hat, you know

Hovering sombrero

Hovering sombrero



Time is flying like an arrow

And the clock hands go so fast they make the wind blow

And it makes the pages of the calender go flying out the window one by one

Til a hundred years are on the front lawn

And the old familiar things are mostly all gone

But the old sombrero just keep hovering on

Hovering sombrero hover on

When we meet on a cloud

What a beautiful face

I have found in this place

That is circling all round the sun

And when we meet on a cloud

I’ll be laughing out loud

I’ll be laughing with everyone I see

Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all

Boiling bulb

William Blake

To Nobodaddy



Why art thou silent & invisible

Father of jealousy

Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds

From every searching Eye



Why darkness & obscurity

In all thy words & laws

That none dare eat the fruit but from

The wily serpents jaws

Or is it because Secresy

gains females loud applause

Herman Melville

Misgivings



When ocean-clouds over inland hills

Sweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,

And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills–

The tempest burning from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.



Nature’s dark side is heeded now–

(Ah! optimist-cheer dishartened flown)–

A child may read the moody brow

Of yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,

And storms are formed behind the storms we feel:

The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

Where Are Burma’s Monks?

By KEVIN DOYLE Fri Oct 12

For much of late September, the road to the eastern gateway of Rangoon’s revered Shwedagon pagoda was a sea of maroon and saffron robes, as hundreds of Buddhist monks gathered to march in protest against Burma’s military government.

Now, two weeks after the junta brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrations, the small monasteries that line both sides of the road are mostly locked and empty, while wooden barricades and bales of rusted barbed wire that police used to seal off Shwedagon are stacked on the pavement. Police and soldiers armed with automatic weapons sit on stools outside the mostly silent monasteries. More are stationed at the entrance of the hilltop temple, the spiritual center of Burmese Buddhism. As many as a thousand monks lived and studied at these small monasteries in the shadow of Shwedagon. But troops now far outnumber the handful of monks that are still seen at Shwedagon and the downtown Sule pagoda, another focal point of the pro-democracy protests.

When the military and police moved to crush the demonstrators, they first went after the monks. Under cover of darkness, say several sources who did not want their names used, doors of monasteries were kicked in and the monks around Shwedagon, including some nuns, were bundled onto trucks and taken away. When asked where the monks had gone, one 30-year-old man who was at Shwedagon in the early days of the protests puts his wrists together in the sign of locked handcuffs. According to Burma’s state-run paper, The New Light of Myanmar, raids on 18 monasteries netted the authorities some 513 monks, one novice, 167 men and 30 women. The monks were summarily defrocked and interrogated and those found to be innocent were re-ordained and sent back to their monasteries. While the paper said that only 118 monks and laymen were still in custody, Rangoon’s pagodas remain empty and quiet; many say the figures are much higher than the state has reported. One Rangoon resident told me that the remaining prisoners will probably be released once the situation calms down, which he believed would be at least a couple of months.

Many who eluded the authorities have fled the city for the relative safety of their home villages, where they remain, still fearful of arrest for their roles in the protests. One man who helped shelter a young monk who had suffered a deep gash on the head while escaping from a monastery raid told me the monk had later fled for the provinces. He believes the attack on the clergy of this devoted Buddhist nation and the imprisonment of monks will come back to haunt the junta. “We believe that if you do good, you receive good,” he says. “If you do bad things you receive bad things. This will be the same for the military.”

To head off such an outcome, the generals are waging a propaganda war to win back Burmese hearts and minds. Burma’s state-run television broadcast footage over the weekend of military officers and their wives presenting gifts of rice and cash to an assembly of forlorn-looking, elderly Buddhist patriarchs in Rangoon. On Sunday, The New Light of Myanmar assured readers that the military was only targeting “bogus” monks and demonstration leaders with its purges. “Although authorities and security members pay respects to the real monks, they had to take action against those bogus monks trying to tarnish the image of the Sasana [religion],” the paper announced.

But many, even some members of Burma’s own oppressive security forces, remain unconvinced. On Monday evening, a 26-year-old member of the plainclothes security apparatus knelt to pay a final homage to the Buddha at Shwedagon before fleeing for the Thai border. The officer had taken part in the nighttime roundup of monks, and it still weighed heavily on his conscience. “I have had enough. I have to leave,” he said as he rose from his knees and started his journey to the border. Still, the nightly roundup of suspects continues under the darkness of a 10 p.m. curfew. One source with friends in the security forces says police are still trying to put names to faces on video footage of those who took part in the demonstrations. Police apparently carried out a nighttime arrest on Monday night near the guesthouse where I stayed, according to the manager, who whispered that to me after watching a story about Burma on the BBC the following morning.

As I traveled to the airport on Tuesday I noticed two elderly Buddhist nuns accepting alms at a large house on the outskirts of the city, the first adult clergy members I had seen doing this all week. But my line of sight was momentarily blocked by an image that better sums up a week in Rangoon in the aftermath of the pro-democracy protests. A fast-moving police wagon passed the two nuns; the arms of the detainees inside protruded through gaps in two iron grills along the vehicle’s side.

For just a moment I could see the frightened faces of the prisoners inside: Dozens of young teenagers, boys and girls wearing brightly-colored T-shirts, packed cheek-to-cheek, their outstretched arms and hands grasping at the world passing by outside.