Stash additions

I have been stash building with some private swaps and added some really neat things. The first picture shows several European fat quarters swapped for some of my excess magazines. I think many of these are going to go into a black and red commissioned quilt. Hurray!
And then there was a swap with Tina who is Hawaiian by birth but now lives in Georgia; she wanted buttons and generously sent a LOT of fabric cuts including a couple of her hula prints, one with wonderful little "hula kids." And then a really great selection of prints and plains -- I had a Christmas in April moment - in fact almost felt like I'd won a lottery -- all for clearing a lot of buttons out of my button box.
It is still April and still National Poetry Month and I have been lax about sharing the wonderful poems I enjoy very much. Here is the end of a fairly long poem written by Stanley Kunitz when he was in his 70s. He's no longer with us but he was over 90 when he died and left us much wonderful poetry, the wisest, I think, written in the last two decades of his life.

From "The Layers"

How shall the heart
be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of
my friends,
those who fell along
the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulating somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone
on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night
when the moon
was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus=clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not in the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of
transformations
in already written.
I am not done with
my changes.