It is estimated Hitler killed 12 million people,half were  European Jews.Stalin is estimated at 7 million.Such numbers are hard to imagine.Especially to feel each one was a unique person like ourself is to us and our loved ones are to us.These were unique ,beloved people.
Surely Christianity itself  has died along with the innocent ?
What I have been thinking recently is: how different is the world and especially Europe is .since we lost so many people and hence lost their descendants? Jewish people  were almost wiped out and I believe Yiddish is not spoken now.Yet Jews are usually  said  to be very intelligent [ like Nobel Prize Awards are much higher in proportion ]
Is it possible to grieve such enormous losses? Nobody knows.We lost then but we lost our own selves as well/Who are we now after such murder?
I wonder , if we include the soldiers killed. in battle , whether Europe has lost   out genetically.That is my thinking on wondering why we have so few admirable politicians and other leaders.It doesn’t explain Donald Trump except he is half German.His family must have left before WW1.I am unsure why so many Germans went to the USA.Possibly to escape rigid European  work/class problems and hope for more freedom.Nobody  quite like that exists here, thank God.
I have read that some people think Judaism was wrecked as a religion by the Holocaust but I hope that is not true.But belief in God is tested by  immense tragedies.And modern life, in general ,has little time for any religion.
I wonder if to the folk who run the world it is a like a big game and we are their toy soldiers.Dispensible.
Vengeance is mine,says the Lord.Where is he?Why is he waiting?

I have been acquainted  well with  grief
I have wept  at home and wept abroad.
I have lost my loved ones to this thief.

I have  known grief  spread like rivers wide
I ‘ve been  hurt  by   painful ,wracked  tears
I have felt the absence of  my God.

I’ve known grief for  more than sixty years
My father and his brother were the first
I have met no  being who’s been spared.

Yet we have no permission  here to weep
I long for ritual like  a   writer needs a pen
I long  to dream of them  while I’m asleep.

Like a fox hides in a hole or den
I would like to hide  when days begin
Uncontained  by  his love  again
As a tree mourns for each little leaf
As God mourns for Adam’s   holy sin
I have been acquainted   with  harsh grief
I have  seen each ghost  and I believe.

Harry Heber with his parents and sister. He arrived in the UK in December 1938 on the Harwich ferry. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/30/uk-descendants-of-jewish-refugees-seek-german-citizenship-after-brexit-vote

I know why  shyness make one blush bright  red .It’s to make people steer clear but why does envy make one green?Is it a metaphor as it’s sickness that usually makes one go green.Envy may be  sickness.Is that it?
I went white all over  when he rejected me.I looked as if I was dyed
She has the blues but it’s not obvious unless you know her really well.Like if she cuts her finger.I blame Edward the 7th.He’s dead, you see.

Keep your sentences  pithy with  a full  stop.Do not fall into it.

He has to have a semi-colon investigation soon.Is it the period or the comma, we may ask.

She has been in a comma for years.It’s a miracle she’s not read as yet.
He came to a full stop by the British Museum.He wants to end it there.I am distraught as I was mistaught.It was not a  real sentence.No verb.

I said he was in the para-military,not he’s got a paragraph on the Mirror.They don’t know what a paragraph is and neither do I. In fact I could write enough about it to fill  a third of this page.But don’t worry,I shan’t.So there!

Comma here,my darling.I have room for two ,,

Don’t reply to me,imaginary data.Exclaim please!!!!

When  do you  use a colon, the teacher asked?
The boy responded:after our food is digested,  until we can evacuate  the remains of the prey.

Why has the whole industry come to a full stop? It’s a cliche.Let’s start it up again.There’s more in this than meets the spy.

At the end os his sentences he always  drew a full stop.Well, he was an artist  ionce.,so he thought but he was autistic,  though on a  bend in the spectrum.Or was it  blend?

As I entered the room I saw a question mark hanging over Mr Smith’s bed.He likes to play puzzles in the night.His wife wants a divorce on the grounds of punctuation games interfering with her sex life.When she looks up. her whole life passes before her.How would you like that?
It depends on the life!

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/semicolons.asp

Even Oxford educated people can forget the rules of grammar,just like nearly everyone else in the UK.In fact, if you are too  good at grammar it might make you bad at it in a very real sense, at this moment in time.I hope you can grasp what I write and use it  for something or other,like, er,what d’you call it?

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6402/the-art-of-fiction-no-229-jane-smiley

“Do you know the writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? He’s a Hungarian psychologist who writes about the state of flow. If you’re in a creative state, then essentially things sort of coagulate and you enter a state of hyper­consciousness—you can write for an hour or so, but it only seems like a few minutes because you’re so concentrated on it. I’ve experienced that a lot, which doesn’t mean there’s no frustration, but I don’t really remember the frustration very well. I remember more when the writing comes together. And I’m willing to seek out that coming together. If I get frustrated, I’ll go eat something, I’ll go open another Diet Coke, I’ll go the barn, I’ll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea. I read an article about how to learn to play a musical instrument. You practice, practice, practice on Friday, then you walk away. And then when you sit down on Saturday, you’re better. Not only because of all the practice, but also because of the walking away. I’m a firm believer in walking away. ”

Do we have a choice?

Sometimes we have to reflect.But it can turn into rumination which is linked to much mental suffering and even illness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24444431

Extract:

“We found that people who didn’t ruminate or blame themselves for their difficulties had much lower levels of depression and anxiety, even if they’d experienced many negative events in their lives,” says Peter Kinderman, who led the study and is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool.”Dwelling on negative thoughts and self blame have previously been recognised as important when it comes to mental health, but not to the extent this study has shown.

“The findings suggest both are crucial psychological pathways to depression and anxiety”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/charles-simic

Some of Simic’s best-known works challenge the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary. He animates and gives substance to inanimate objects, discerning the strangeness in household items as ordinary as a knife or a spoon. Robert Shaw wrote in the New Republic that the most striking perception of the author’s early poems was that “inanimate objects pursue a life of their own and present, at times, a dark parody of human existence.” Childhood experiences of war, poverty, and hunger also lie behind a number of poems. In the Georgia Review, Peter Stitt claimed that Simic’s most persistent concern “is with the effect of cruel political structures upon ordinary human life….The world of Simic’s poems is frightening, mysterious, hostile, dangerous.” However, Stitt noted, Simic tempers this perception of horror with gallows humor and an ironic self-awareness: “Even the most somber poems … exhibit a liveliness of style and imagination that seems to re-create, before our eyes, the possibility of light upon the earth. Perhaps a better way of expressing this would be to say that Simic counters the darkness of political structures with the sanctifying light of art.”

Photo by Deirdre W..Copyright

Why I Still Write Poetry

” My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going. I now regret destroying my early poems, because I no longer remember whom they were modeled after. At the time I wrote them, I was reading mostly fiction and had little knowledge of contemporary poetry and modernist poets. The only extensive exposure I had to poetry was in the year I attended school in Paris before coming to the United States. They not only had us read Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, but they made us memorize certain poems of theirs and recite them in front of the class. This was such a nightmare for me as a rudimentary speaker of French—and guaranteed fun for my classmates, who cracked up at the way I mispronounced some of the most beautiful and justly famous lines of poetry in French literature—that for years afterwards I couldn’t bring myself to take stock of what I learned in that class. Today, it’s clear to me that my love of poetry comes from those readings and those recitations, which left a deeper impact on me than I realized when I was young”