Sonnet For Christmas

These are the things our Christmas Day should leave
Untarnished and untouched by dust and blight:
The warm, sweet kindliness of Christmas Eve,
Its heavenly glow of rapture and delight;
The breathless wonder that the stars awake;
The new-found faith that where a child is born
There is a little life for God's own sake,
Though lowly be its lot on Christmas morn;
The wide good-will we feel for all mankind
And that true peace that heals the aching mind.
And though the hurrying years be loud with strife,
A radiance lives that all men yet shall see,
A golden glory, rich with fullest life,
When each shall know his own divinity.

USA For Africa
We Are The World

(Lionel Richie) There comes a time when we heed a certain call
(Stevie Wonder) When the world must come together as one
There are people dying (Paul Simon) And it's time to lend a hand
To life, the greatest gift of all

(Kenny Rogers) We can't go on pretending day by day
(James Ingram) That someone, somewhere will soon make a change
(Tina Turner) We're all a part of God's great big family
(Billy Joel) And the truth, you know love is all we need

(Michael Jackson) We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving
(Diana Ross) There's a choice we're making, we're saving our own lives
It's true, we'll make a better day, just you and me

(Dionne Warwick) Well, send them your heart so they know that someone cares
(Willie Nelson) And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stone to bread
(Al Jarreau) And so we all must lend a helping hand

(Bruce Springsteen) We are the world, we are the children
(Kenny Loggins) We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving
(Steve Perry) There's a choice we're making, we're saving our own lives
(Daryl Hall) It's true, we'll make a better day, just you and me

(Michael Jackson) When you're down and out, there seems no hope at all
(Huey Lewis) But if you just believe, there's no way we can fall
(Cyndi Lauper) Well, let's realize that a change can only come
(Kim Carnes) When we stand together as one

(Everyone) We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day so let's start giving
There's a choice we're making, we're saving our own lives
It's true, we'll make a better day, just you and me.

A Sonnet by William Shakespeare

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Short verse outlining Mount Etna, Virgil's Aeneid, Book III

The port capacious, and secure from wind,
Is to the foot of thund'ring Etna joined.
By turns a pitchy cloud she rolls on high:
By turns hot embers from her entrails fly,
And flakes of mounting flames, that lick the sky.
Oft from her bowels massy rocks are thrown,
And shivered by the force come piece-meal down.
Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow,
Fed from the fiery springs that boil below.

The Snake
(By Emily Dickinson)

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him - did you not?
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun -
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

Easter

I got me flowers to straw Thy way,
I got me boughs off many a tree;
But Thou wast up by break of day,
And brought'st Thy sweets along with Thee.

Yet though my flowers be lost, they say
A heart can never come too late;
Teach it to sing Thy praise this day,
And then this day my life shall date.