Welcome to Gaia! ::

though i'm very new here, i'd like to submit this poem by robert frost.
to me, this poem desribes the path we must choose in life and how it will make all the difference to what you want to be.

The Road Not Taken
by: Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy ans wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.

Here are some pictures i believe are beautiful and other things.




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1o
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Poem. Its just cute. :]

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
She'd scour the pots and scrape the pans,
Candy the yams and spice the hams,
And though her daddy would scream and shout,
She simply would not take the garbage out.
And so it piled up to the ceilings:
Coffee grounds, potato peelings,
Brown bananas, rotten peas,
Chunks of sour cottage cheese.
It filled the can, it covered the floor,
It cracked the window and blocked the door
With bacon rinds and chicken bones,
Drippy ends of ice cream cones,
Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel,
Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,
Pizza crusts and withered greens,
Soggy beans and tangerines,
Crusts of black burned buttered toast,
Gristly bits of beefy roasts. . .
The garbage rolled on down the hall,
It raised the roof, it broke the wall. . .
Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs,
Globs of gooey bubble gum,
Cellophane from green baloney,
Rubbery blubbery macaroni,
Peanut butter, caked and dry,
Curdled milk and crusts of pie,
Moldy melons, dried-up mustard,
Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,
Cold french fried and rancid meat,
Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat.
At last the garbage reached so high
That it finally touched the sky.
And all the neighbors moved away,
And none of her friends would come to play.
And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said,
"OK, I'll take the garbage out!"
But then, of course, it was too late. . .
The garbage reached across the state,
From New York to the Golden Gate.
And there, in the garbage she did hate,
Poor Sarah met an awful fate,
That I cannot now relate
Because the hour is much too late.
But children, remember Sarah Stout
And always take the garbage out!

-shel silverstein


DUST OF SNOW
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

-Robert Frost

Hot damn.
I was going to submit that.
Glad it won.
=D

I felt a sudden tremor of delight,
a happiness that went beyond my body
as if the walls around me had collapsed,
and a small dark room where I had been confined
had been amazingly transformed by light.
Radiant and invincible, I knew
I was the source of energy, and all
the jails and sheriffs could not hold me back.
I had been strong enough. And I was free.

beowulf


site to get some of the chapters
http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/beowulf.html

If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

Taj Mahal Story
(the short of it)

(continued from story)
The emperor was relieved and he too retired for the night, planning to visit the harem in the morning. But a few hours later he was awakened with the unsettling news that Mumtaz Mahal had suffered a relapse and was calling for him. He immediately dressed and made his way through the maze of war tents, arriving at the harem to find a solemn assembly of doctors grouped around the bedside. The queen was dying.

Everyone was immediately dismissed from the room except for Sati-un-nisa, the queen's favorite lady-in-waiting, and Wazir Khan, her beloved doctor. Wazir Khan feared the worst, he told the emperor, for Mumtaz Mahal had earlier confided to him that she had heard her child cry in the womb before its birth, an ominous portent.

For several hours the emperor sat at the bedside and spoke quietly with Mumtaz Mahal. Toward the early hours of the morning she lost consciousness and before the sun rose she was dead. Legend has it that before dying she extracted two promises from him. One was that he would not beget children on any other wife her death, and the other was that he should build the world's most beautiful mausoleum over her grave. Whether or not the story is true, Shah Jahan certainly had no other children, and he did begin the mausoleum almost immediately after her death.

Work began on the Taj Mahal in 1632. For twenty-two years, 20,000 workers from India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Europe labored to construct the Taj Mahal. Spread over an area of 42 acres (17-hectare) the total cost of construction came out to be approximately 32 million Rupees. The site was chosen near the capital Agra, on the southwest bank of the River Yamuna. Although it is not known for sure who planned the Taj, the name of an Indian architect of Persian descent, Ustad Ahmad Lahori, has been cited in many sources.

Surprisingly, the origin of the name "Taj Mahal" is not clear. Court histories from Shah Jahan's reign only call it the rauza (tomb) of Mumtaz Mahal. It is generally believed that "Taj Mahal" (translated as "Crown of the Palace") is an abbreviated version of her name, Mumtaz Mahal. As Peter Mundy and other early travelers refer to the empress in their accounts as "Taje Mahal," the mausoleum may have also acquired the name in the seventeenth century.

Here is the link for the full story about the Taj Mahal (there are two pages on the website). http://www.exoticindiaart.com/article/tajmahal/

The Palace of Versailles