Praise Be! to The Great Spirit for the rainbow warriors-
And the everlasting glory of their journey home.
Praise Be for twinned parabolas of falling waters
In their Moonlit leapings in noctilucent Foam.
Praise Be for burbling brooks and chortling streams.
Where the little ones feed late into twilight
In sweet waters fulfilling their Maker's dreams,
They flash and play and grow strong in His sight.
Praise Be! to the Great Spirit , whose robe warms them
And blesses them through dark winter's deep calm- -
Fluffs them out on a Blue Norther's cloud be-decked hem,
And blesses their journey through the sea's salty balm.
Praise Be for the Quicksilver Messenger's star-bedazzled track.
Their noble mission, coded in DNA's magic rhymes,
Leads them to feed on the Arctic seas and back,
Unfurling knowledge stored since the dinosaurs' times.
Praise Be for one of the fiercest creatures that we know.
We'll save them yet from extinction's blackest night-
To jump again, like the rainbow within a rainbow,
We last saw gleaming in childhood's perfect light.
Paul Averill Liebow MD FACEP
Copyright June 2005
BLUE NORTHER . The term blue norther denotes a weather phenomenon common to large areas of the world's temperate zones–a rapidly moving autumnal cold front that causes temperatures to drop quickly and that often brings with it precipitation followed by a period of blue skies and cold weather. What is peculiar to Texas is the term itself. The derivation of blue norther is unclear; at least three folk attributions exist. The term refers, some say, to a norther that sweeps "out of the Panhandle under a blue-black sky"–that is, to a cold front named for the appearance of its leading edge. Another account states that the term refers to the appearance of the sky after the front has blown through, as the mid-nineteenth-century variant "blew-tailed norther" illustrates. Yet another derives the term from the fact that one supposedly turns blue from the cold brought by the front. Variants include blue whistler, used by J. Frank Dobie,qv and, in Oklahoma, blue darter and blue blizzard. Though the latter two phrases are found out-of-state, blue norther itself is a pure Texasism. The dramatic effects of the blue norther have been noted and exaggerated since Spanish times in Texas. But that the blue norther is unique to Texas is folklore.
