i'm sick of the election

So, I escape into poetry. These are two poems I pour over again and again. These poems are an oasis of beauty and verbal precision.
....
As though the sun's rays, denied by angle
and position of the earth their customary
part, ricochet a thousand times among
the mirrored crystals, emerged more intense,
more light than light itself, so the man,
stumbling from thought to thought, catches
balance, a blinking new-born Lazarus....
-Gary Geddes, "Quality of Light"

In a time that breaks
in cutting pieces all around,
when men, voiceless
against thing-ridden men,
set themselves on fire, it seems
too difficult and rare
to think of the life of a man
grown whole in the world,
at peace and in place.
But having thought of it
I am beyond the time
I might have sold my hands
or sold my voice and mind
to the arguments of power
that go blind against
what they would destroy.
-Wendell Berry, "To Think of the Life of a Man"

It is as CSL said, "We read in order to know we are not alone." If one of my students falls in love with art or reading, all the forms, record-keeping,