Once I Believed

Once I believed

That there was a place

For someone

like me

Once I believed

That I would

Dream Dreams

Live and Love

Once I believed

That in spite of it all

There was a place

For me

Once...

I believed, I dreamed

I hoped, 

Once..

Once I believed 

That life was grand

That there was joy

That there was hope

Once..

But no more

No more do 

I believe

Too many times

The dreams have been shattered

The heart has been broken

Nothing has mattered

Too many times

Those that said they care

Walked away

Left me alone

Too many times

I sat and cried

For a friend

to stand by my side

Too many times

The battle has been lost

and the victor takes 

the spoils

Leaving me

Alone

Betrayed

lost

@Shauni

Do You See Me?

Do you see me?

Really?

Can you see 

Behind the Mask?

Have you looked

Beyond 

Into who I am

What I dream

Do you hear me?

My Cry

My Voice

My heart?

How can you know me

When you do not see?

You do not listen

You do not feel?

How can you know me

When you can not see

beyond the smile

The laugh

Do you know

My Reality?

My Pain?

My insecurities?

Do you hear 

How loud I cry?

Do you feel

My Pain?

And yet you 

Judge me

Mock me

Betray me

You leave me alone

To fight the world

suffering 

in pain..

Abandoned

Betrayed

Thrown away

Alone.

@Shauni

I am Undone

I stand alone

the night calls, 

The mist is rising

Darkness falls..

As the world ignores

the desperate moan

The demons thrive

I stand alone

Battled and betrayed

Hope all but gone

Bruised and scared

I am undone

Used and abused

for someone's gain

Never minding 

My constant Pain

The battle is raging

The war not won

I stand alone

I am undone

@Shauni

Merry Christmas to All

A Chance of a Lifetime

I know this blog is dedicated to poetry but seriously.. what could be more poetic than a chance of a lifetime
Such an exciting opportunity! My oldest daughter whom for web purposes I refer to as Word Girl has been given the opportunity to spend her summer in Peru. Yes Eight entire weeks discovering the mysteries of the rainforest! She will be traveling with Operation Wallacea




Where she will be PP101 Biodiversity Monitoring in the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve

Research Assistants on this project will be based on the research ship and will need to be prepared for the hot and humid conditions of the Amazonian rainforest. Whilst some respite can be found on the boat where the fan-cooled cabins, showers and food provide a retreat from the tough working conditions, the main reward is the opportunity to see and work with such a huge range of birds and animals, including the larger, and more rare, animals such as pumas, primates and tapirs.

 There is a large team of mainly Peruvian researchers based on the research ship with nine different research programmes running. Research Assistants signing up for the various projects will help on all the projects over the course of their stay. There is a strong research atmosphere on the boat with teams coming and going at all times of day and night on various research tasks.

 Research tasks which require volunteer manpower include:, spotlight surveys for caimans and diet studies of this species (which necessitates capture of the caimans through noosing), transect surveys for the abundant Pink and Grey River Dolphins and an elusive population of manatees at this site, mist netting surveys of the bird communities utilising the forest understory, transect counts of wading birds, point counts of macaws as indicators of forest fruiting, gill net surveys of

fish communities, standardised searching surveys to characterise the amphibian communities, land based transect counts of primates, large mammals and game birds as indicators of levels of exploitation, checking 20 camera traps run at a variety of habitats and depending on water level. In addition to these surveys there are dissertation studies where assistance may also be required - for example assisting with behavioural data observations on the primate species.

After her "official" trip is over she will be stopping in Machu Picchu to explore the ancient ruins..

Does this sound like the most fantastic of trips? Well I am sure it will be.. Of course there are expenses involved and we have started a fund raising push to help her cover those expenses. If anyone is interested in donating.. please click on our donating button.. It will show here in this post as well as on the side.. Thanks for all your support whether it be verbal or financial

Shauni

Happy Thanksgiving!

Get off the computer! and have a Happy Thanksgiving

Support Banned Books

Did you know that this week is Banned Books Week? It's a week that has been set aside for the last 30 years to promote reading. To stand up against those who would make our choices for us. It is for those who choose to proudly say I READ..

I grew up in a house where books were plentiful.. where more often than not when we were at sporting events, if you wanted to find my mom, you looked over to the nearest set of trees and there my mom would be in her chair, reading a book. Not watching the game, reading a book. The thought of not having a book on me at all times is inconceivable.

My mom always said, it didn't matter if your child would only read comic books, at least he is reading. Of course that didn't pertain to her children we read classics.. *rolls eyes* She still hasn't forgiven me for my love of romance books.. but that is another story. I do know, more often than not if she had heard that a book was banned and she felt it was age appropriate, we had to read it. I tried to raise my children in a similar manner. I can say with great pride, all four read.. they have unique and interesting tastes but read they do.

Sadly, not all people are afforded that right.. schools, governments, churches all for one reason or another choose to challenge or ban a book.. How can that possible be right? Sure some books are graphic, some books are extreme, some books are *gasp* bad.. but it is not the right of State to make that choice for us. Parents need to guide their children, encourage them to read and question what they are reading.. to make their own choices...in short to LEARN..

I found this list on Rebecca Ryals Russell's Website  and  thought it needed to be shared..

SOME of the 2011 challenged or banned books were:

    The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
    Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
    The Flamingo Rising, by Larry Baker
    The Notebook Girls: Four Friends, One Diary, Real Life, by Baskin, Newman, Pollitt-Cohen, Toombs
    Running with Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs
    My Mom’s Having a Baby, by Dori Hillestad Butler
    Betrayed, by P.C. and Kristin Cast
    Staying Far for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher
    Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
    Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
    Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
    The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
    The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
    Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

In 2010 the top 10 most frequently challenged books were:

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson

2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

3. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

4. Crank, by Ellen Hopkins

5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

6. Lush, by Natasha Friend

7. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

8. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

9. Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie

10. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer

But it’s not just contemporary books that get banned, classics get banned and challenged, too.
    *The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    2. *The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
    3. *The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
    4. *To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    6. Ulysses by James Joyce
    7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
    8. *The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
    9. *1984 by George Orwell  (This one is the most ironic as its theme is suppression of books and thoughts)
    10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
    11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
    12. *Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
    13. *Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
    14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
    15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
    16. *Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    17. *Animal Farm by George Orwell
    18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
    19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
    20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
    21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
    22. *Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
    23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
    24. *Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
    25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
    26. *Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
    27. Native Son by Richard Wright
    28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
    29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
    30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
    31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
    32. *The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
    33. *The Call of the Wild by Jack London
    34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
    35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
    36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
    37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
    38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
    39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
    40. *The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
    41. *Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
    42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
    43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
    44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
    45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
    46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
    47. *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
    48. *Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
    49. *A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
    50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
    51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
    52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
    53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
    54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
    55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
    56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
    57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
    58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
    59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
    60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
    61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
    62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
    64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
    65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
    66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
    67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
    68. Light in August by William Faulkner
    69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
    70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
    71. *Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
    72. *A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
    73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
    74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
    75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
    76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
    77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
    78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
    79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
    80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
    81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
    82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
    83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
    84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
    85. *The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
    86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
    87. The Bostonians by Henry James
    88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
    89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
    90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
    91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
    93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
    94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
    95. *Kim by Rudyard Kipling
    96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
    98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
    99. *Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
    100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie



To read the entire article click HERE

You want to support banned books, share what books you have read that have been banned.. shout it loud and proud!!

Shauni