Sidney Keyes (killed in action in Tunisia, aged 20 inWW2]

Here is his magnificent elegy in memory of William Wordsworth:

No room for mourning: he’s gone out
Into the noisy glen, or stands between the stones
Of the broken ridge, or you’ll hear his shout
Rolling among the screes, he being a boy again.
He’ll never fail nor die
And if they laid his bones
In the granite vaults or iron sarcophagi
Of fame, he’d rise at the first summer rain
And stride across the hills to seek
His rest among the bony lands and clouds.
He was a stormy day, a wet peak
Spearing the sky; and look, about its base
Words flower like crocuses in the gaunt woods,
Blank though the dalehead and the hanging face

http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/plath/ariel.htm

From the article below

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6203/the-art-of-fiction-no-218-deborah-eisenberg

Extract

Those of us who are the grandchildren of immigrants often have a void in our psyche that reflects a situation of danger or terror that our grandparents endured. The first generation born in the United States often tries to erase or suppress what they know of their parents’ experience in order to provide a level playing field for their children, but in fact experience and fears can be transmitted in various forms across many generations. Many of us grew up knowing nothing, or next to nothing, about the horrors our grandparents lived through, and when we search for the source of certain anxieties, all we can locate is a kind of blank inscrutability.

You might say,he died in a holy place
Tended by angels
Or  you might say,he died on a trolley in And E
Both are true.
Also that he spent some days in a rehabilitation centre
Being made to exercise
Until his heart stopped   and he  was resuscitated by paramedics
Before being sent to die again
In a more suitable setting.Namely
A & E,Lovely Hospital
But no bed!
Nice nurses.
I didn’t even realise it was A & E until they apologised.

What the hell,a villanelle!
It looks too hard for such as me
Still I will write ,yes,I write well

I have a story I can tell
It’s from the English who love tea
What a hell,oh villanelle

I saw a man with a sea shell
I asked him for a pod of pea
I write well.yeah super Nell

I often wonder if I smell
As I drink so much  greenish tea
What’s s to tell ,my villanelle?

But worry makes life into hell
And it’s bad for those who see
I write well,but who can tell?

I must take much charity
If you ask, what is your fee?
What the hell oh villanelle
I write well but   life is hell.

I prefer dresses in hot weather but so far  we’ve only had one week when I could wear one,or in fact two.One is very thin cotton voile.The other is a bit heavier.I think I look better  in a dress but it’s regarded as eccentric now unless it’s a sleeveless maxi-dress.
There are 2 things wrong with those
1 They have no sleeves hence display a part which is better covered
2 They trail around ones feet getting dirty and also possibly one might catch a foor aand fall over.
Killed by maxi-dress?
A hardworking internet writer fell over the hem of  her dress while  getting onto the  downward escalator at Warren St  tube station.

Her last words:

“I should have gone to Foyles.” or “I wanted some foil”

But a doctor said that Tottenham Court Rd was also dangerous.She has left her money to a charity for the disabled to install  lifts in more underground stations

There, that’s a fantasy for you.Anyway they look like curtains!

I was ostracised by  my own cats
Who refused me the use of my mat
They sent me upstairs
With their fierce  amber glares
And refused to converse after that.

I went to Cambridge  with my new  little cat.
She’s been awarded a  degree, aegrotat
For being sick in the exam
And  having a fit in a pan.
She’s hysterical,how about that?

A cat can’t have any therapy
For they cannot speak human ,you see.
So how could they know
A neurosis ain’t so.
And moreover they can’t pay a fee.

Reblogged on WordPress.com

Source: On White Privilege and Taking Sides

Click to access losing_your_partner_booklet2.pdf

Words were spoken long before any alphabet was invented.Feeling into words can mean many things.But if we feel into an actual word,we feel into the sounds in the word when someone uses it.We say sometimes people’s voices have n o affect.Other’s have melodious voices,some speak as if they fire bullets.We might put more of our own feelings into our words or  try to hide how we feel.Possibly we pick up much more from each other than we realise.
But how do we put more feeling into a poem and how do we avoid it being a kind of longer cliche? I think the rhythm  is one factor.
Sometimes poems are savage like Sylvia Plath’s late ones

.We can imitate various sounds in nature… bird song,machine guns,feet pounding on the ground.Sometimes we plan it or ,more usually, we leave it to happen naturally.If it does not the poem may sound banal or dead even if it is  very good technically.

The red coals glowed warming us like a mother
Faces and little men were formed and disappeared
In the back room,the kettle was always on
There was a special grate with a flat top.
Kettle  blackened  on one side was always simmering.
Before,we had a fireplace with an oven where our nightclothes were warmed
Or potato cakes baked.Why,it even heated the water for the hot tap
We didn’t have a bath,only the tin one
Coals  sacred  like the burning bush,bring
Memories of love and joy at Xmas
With smiling parents and brothers calmed for once
I think the next year he was ill.
I don’t want to forget they were happy for  7 years
And mother was a mother then

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10288645/Seamus-Heaney-putting-feelings-into-words.html

“His long and productive journey continued through half a century, with countless triumphs of language and sensibility, always compressed and brilliant, like a horseshoe hammered out on the anvil of his writing desk and dipped in water: an image given shape in “The Forge”, his fond recollection of an old blacksmith. The collected poems constitute a diverse body of work that calls to the ear and lightens the spirit, asking one to take seriously the work of poetry, which is to listen to “the music of what happens”. Poetry became, for him, what he called “a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”.

Requiem for the Croppies
Written in 1966, on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Printed in Door into The Dark, 1969.

“Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin

And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.”

They say we should plan ahead for summer and so I got these UV protective sunglasses.But it’s the wettest summer for ages.Still they might come in useful in the winter when the sun is low in the sky..
I think soon the winter clothes will be on show and I find that a bit sad.I recall when M and S used to sell real winter coats made of wool.But now there are few about.I suppose it’s since more people got cars and they don’t need a long coat.But at the bus s  stop I need one.And padded jackets are too hot for the top half  of me and cold for the rest.Why do women dress as if they are going to climb a mountain or lie on the beach or chop wood.And why was I berated for baking my own bread?
As for men,I don’t like half length trousers very much.And where are the sports jackets in  tweed?What is so great about anoraks?
O f course some people look nice whatever they wear and  larger folk don’t have so much choice.I say go for the flowers,fruit or humorous T shirts/tops.Unless you are Leonard Cohen who dresses in grey and black and his house is decorated like that too.He has no pictures on the wall either.No wonder he’s been depressed all his life until when he was 70 he felt much better,

Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.