Oh, those iPhone photo apps!!

 I got a Kindle book on the subject of Instagram yesterday, because I looked at Instagram again and wanted to do something I could not figure out how to do! I am only a little way into the book, but so far, it has just inspired me to get other apps it talked about. This one is called Shakeme and arranges selected photos in different patterns when you shake your iPhone. This is a combo of three photos that were already modified ed in other apps, like Glaze, Tangled FX and ColorLake. The child is "Little Red", the red-headed younger sister of the girl in this post, and one of the family of grandkids that recently visited us in this glorious summer up North.

Tonight's poem is a nod to Shakespeare, because so many of Akhmatova's other poems are so bleakly colored by the times she lived through in Stalinist Russia. This was written before all that; it's the first one in the book of Kunitz's translations of Anna Akhmatova, on page 39.

Reading Hamlet

A barren patch to the right of the cememtery,
behind it a river flashing blue.
You said: "All right then, get thee to a nunnery,
or go get married to a fool . . ."

It was the sort of this that princes always say.
but these are words that one remembers.
May they flow a hundred centuries in a row
like an ermine mantle from his shoulders.

Anna Akhmatova, Kiev, 1909

The last two lines are like a blessing or a consecration. Think of something you would like to bless with a hundred-century mantle before you go to sleep tonight! And rest well.