I put a rondeau on Facebook and my sister commented:Great.. that was the crossword clue I couldn’t do today!She still had the newspaper on her lap.
A little black cat is sitting on the patio.She looks quite nervous but didn’t run off.
A coincidence
Day: July 29, 2016
Why aye,lass
Aye,Morecambe Bay ,they crossed at times by horse
The boatman knew the tides and river’s course.
The shape of Langdale Pikes were seen ahead
And kept back travellers’ fear of river bed,
There were quicksands,spirits and much worse-
Premonitions of a Chinese curse.
Yet as we stand and gaze who feels remorse?
Cockle pickers all sent here by force.
Not tortured except by what was never said
We know such silence fills a soul with dread.
The death, the grief, the hearse
Ah lass, Morecambe Bay.
Across the sands lie Cartmel and Furness
Ships were built by men with tenderness
Now all the yards lie empty and quite dead
While Barrow’s streets provide men with a bed,
The streets were children played affect my breath.
Beautiful and sad,oh, Morecambe Bay.
Oh Morecambe Bay betrayed,they caught their death
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Stabilise me with tea
Doctor,doctor
What’s wrong?
My IQ keeps going up and down.
It must be low today
Why do you say that?
If you were wise you’d avoid the medical profession
Wisdom is not the same as Intelligence>
No,wisdom is a virtue.
But can you stabilise mr
Where.. at the bottom?
Surely the top is better.
It depends on the weather
He that is down need fear no fall
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I’d like to hide
I’d like to hide myself from human sight
In a big oak wardrobe with a light
For as my skin is thinner than I like
Every word affects me like a knife
I’ll come out in the evening for a bite
And look for poets whose words I wish to cite.
In our culture, individual rights
Have been used so much in manners maladroit
I’d rather fish with Hughes and hope for pike
Than socialise as I’m too erudite
And thus I put humanity to flight
I’d like to hide.
Arguing whether Brexit was alright
Such matters do not fill me with delight
I hate to argue with a demagogue and break
Her temper which she’d hid for kindness’ sake
In my wardrobe I will go on strike
And starve myself to make room for a bloke.
I’d like to hide
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Scientific racism
I am a cat
“Such theories, which often postulated a “master race”, usually “Nordic” and “Aryan”, were along with eugenics, pioneered by Sir Francis Galton (among others) and popularized at the turn of the 20th century, a main influence of the Nazi racial policies and their program of eugenics. Galton developed the science of Eugenics whose primary concept was “control” and promotion of quantification and analytical measurements of “desirable traits” so as to set a guide on how to obtain the “truly proper breeding”. [1] However, this was not necessarily a continuous relationship, as several influential authors of Nazism were not themselves anti-semitic.
Quite to the contrary, Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), for example, was a philo-semite who placed the “Jewish race” above all. Thus, although his racial theories largely influenced Nazi ideologies, they had to adapt him to suit their mindset. Apart from Gobineau’s 1853 The Inequality of Human Races,[2] other scientific racist works that largely influenced Nazism include Francis Galton’s 1870 Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences,[3] Madison Grant’s 1916/1924 The Passing of the Great Race[4] and Lothrop T. Stoddard’s 1920 The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy[5]”
Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist, who laid the bases of binomial nomenclature (the method of naming species) and is known as the “father of modern taxonomy” (the science of describing, categorizing and naming organisms) was also a pioneer in defining the concept of “race” as applied to humans. Within Homo sapiens he proposed four taxa of a lower (unnamed) rank.
These categories are, Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeanus. They were based on place of origin at first, and later skin color. Each race had certain characteristics that were endemic to individuals belonging to it. Native Americans were reddish, stubborn, and angered easily. Africans were black, relaxed and negligent. Asians were yellow, avaricious, and easily distracted. Europeans were white, gentle, and inventive.[10
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When we run
The path to take may seem a curious choice
For usually we run away from pain
But sages and deep wisdom with one voice
Tell us we must face it and remain.
For when we run, the action aids our fear
It grows with each long step to giant size
But images are not what they appear
As fantasy can be a dangerous lie.
If we stay and trembling shake and stare
The elephant may turn into an ant
And yet it seems for death we had prepared
Our narrow focus made of this a giant.
The paradox of wisdom isn’t clear
We trust the deep while we outstare ouir fear?
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On quicksands
On quicksands we must travel at some speed
Pausing, to the sucking sands we cede.
No rumination nor excuse will save
Nor will our weeping stop the steady waves
For of our needs , stark nature takes no heed.
If on our journey should we pause to read
Or peer on phone to see where paths should lead?
No, we must walk as swiftly as is brave .
And this alone may give us what we need
On quicksands.
We’d best not stop despite our feet may bleed
As when a bull is charging we need speed
No special clothing nor appearance suave
Will distinguish us from harlots or from knaves.
We’re at risk as in a storm a reed
Will break and God does not deceive.
On quicksands.
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Politeness,the history.
From the article
“http://www.thebookoflife.org/politeness/
Paradoxically, the polite person who is pessimistic about their own nature, doesn’t in fact end up behaving horribly with anyone. So aware are they of their own dislikable sides, they nimbly minimise their impact upon the world. It is their extraordinary suspicion of themselves that helps them be – in everyday life – uncommonly friendly, trustworthy and kind.”
“”The Polite person also passionately cares about spreading kindness, love and goodness on a mass scale, but they are cautious about the chances of doing so on any realistic time horizon. Yet their belief that you perhaps can’t make things a lot better for a huge number of people in the coming decades makes them feel that it is still very much a worthy goal to try and make a modest, minor improvement in the lives of the few humans you do have direct contact with in the here and now. They may never be able to transform another person’s prospects entirely or rescue the species from its agonies, but they can smile and stop for five minutes to chat to a neighbour about the weather. Their modesty around what is possible makes them acutely sensitive to the worth of the little things that can be done before today is over.”
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Rondeau
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/rondeau-poetic-form
“The rondeau’s form is not difficult to recognize: as it is known and practiced today, it is composed of fifteen lines, eight to ten syllables each, divided stanzaically into a quintet, a quatrain, and a sestet. Therentrement consists of the first few words or the entire first line of the first stanza, and it recurs as the last line of both the second and third stanzas. Two rhymes guide the music of the rondeau, whose rhyme scheme is as follows (R representing the refrain): aabba aabR aabbaR.”
“Where the rentrement appears in its traditional French form, it typically does not adhere to the rhyme-scheme–in the interest of maintaining the line’s buoyancy and force. But when nineteenth-century English poets adopted the rondeau, many saw (or heard) the rentrement as more effective if rhymed and therefore more assimilated into the rest of the poem. An example of a solemn rondeau is the Canadian army physician John McCrae’s 1915 wartime poem,”
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The challenge of writing a rondeau is finding an opening line worth repeating and choosing two rhyme sounds that offer enough word choices. Modern rondeaus are often playful; for example, “Rondel” by Frank O’Hara begins with this mysterious directive: “Door of America, mention my fear to the cigars,” which becomes the poem’s refrain.
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In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the
Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly
accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his
freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House.
How my heart sings 