I got  a message which looks very real but the email header  shows an IP address in Indianapolis.So beware

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.749153

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/10/tell-children-trump

The problem seems to me that we were supposed to be  politically correct and so not give voice to things like racism and speaking about women is an  offensive way.But like many imposed solutions it didn’t work very well as it merely hid how some people,mainly  white men, really felt.The change would have to come from a deeper place. and take longer to  become genuine.And women are partly to blame for marrying rich men merely to get access to wealth.We do need  men who are willing to support a family should they choose to have one,but not to go or the richest  men around  who  will be very dominant.

Is the demagogue  a demi-god?
Are anxieties eased by  backing  fools?
What will he next  use as his new rod?
With what connections will he  come to rule?

Democracy’s not served by baying mobs.
Yet how can such a man have risen high?
Seems almost like a robbery,  smash and grab.
His friends have altered truth till it now lies.

We tremble, wondering what the future holds.
We shudder , wondering who will bear the pains.
And is there something odd in lies so bold?
What   folly gave him  powers he wished to gain?

We live from hour to hour   with saddened minds
For to the poor and lost ,can he be kind?

As I walk this  path edged by  thin trees
I see  a mile  of fields all ripe with wheat
Despite the heat, I feel a gentle breeze.

I like to sit by trees ,in summer heat.
The leaves make little fans lit up by sun
So shaded by the trees I love to meet.

I like to greet my friends,  just one by one
I like to share but not  to    yell and fight
Then conversation deep can linger on.

In winter there’s a different, slanted light
It makes long  shadows  from  the trees  stretch out
There’s sharper  contrast,  black  encounters white.

What is this world when nature cannot shout
Her signals are emitted but ignored
A politician now is  more a lout.

On Dover Beach ,great waves roar to the shore
Just as Arnold wrote  so long ago
But what’s transmitted worries me far more.

The tyrant in the USA’s another  blow
His emblem  is ingratitude or gore
From this election who knows what will grow?

 
What fools we are to  ravage  and to tear
What aggressive acts  must all now bear?
As I walk the   path edged by  live trees
Despite the heat, my soul and body freeze

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/types-of-rhyme/

Slant Rhymes (sometimes called imperfect, partial, near, oblique, off etc.)
Rhyme in which two words share just a vowel sound (assonance – e.g. “heart” and “star”) or in which they share just a consonant sound (consonance – e.g. “milk” and “walk”). Slant rhyme is a technique perhaps more in tune with the uncertainties of the modern age than strong rhyme. The following example is also from Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” :

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

Eye Rhymes
Rhyme on words that look the same but which are actually pronounced differently – for example “bough” and “rough”. The opening four lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, for example, go :

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Here, “temperate” and “date” look as though they rhyme, but few readers would pronounce “temperate” so that they did. Beware that pronunciations can drift over time and that rhymes can end up as eye rhymes when they were originally full (and vice versa).

http://www.poemofquotes.com/articles/10-easy-tips-to-write-better-poetry.php

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/07/22/learning-to-let-go-of-past-hurts-5-ways-to-move-on/

http://classroom.synonym.com/rules-terza-rima-poetry-19541.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/andrew-sullivan-trump-america-and-the-abyss.html

Quote:

This is what we now know. Donald Trump is the first candidate for president who seems to have little understanding of or reverence for constitutional democracy and presents himself as a future strongman. This begins with his character — if that word could possibly be ascribed to his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche. He has revealed himself incapable of treating other people as anything but instruments to his will. He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off.

I had a new doctor who pricked me
In the hand with a syringe,he stuck in me
But  when he pressed  on the dressing
I found it oppressing
So in a rage ,I cried out, why not just  kick me?

However, the blood formed a clot
Kn my brain where the  neurons were hot
Some fault in design
Took away my old mind
Now I’m about to be shot

He said kicking patients was bad
Though it might give some speed to the sad.
So I placed my forefinger
In a socket   and bingo
I was shocked until I felt  almost glad.

So now every morning at eight
I measure wy height and my weight
I eat the cat’s whiskers
And all of my sister’s
After that,I ‘m  real thrilled to go straight

For those  souls who missed  out in Vienna..
Crystal Nacht, the  blood lust and its terror
Catherine wheels  going round wild in  Sienna:
What Europe did ,hits  America tomorrow.

Tomorrow has arrived yesterday for the tenor
Leonard Cohen was  already fey  before dinner
We feel sad and  confused by the sinners
Who repent prior to voting  to bin us.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/dec/15/poetry-protest-politics

“The Peterloo massacre in 1819, where magistrates sent in cavalry to disperse a crowd of over 60,000 who had gathered to protest for political reform.

Shortly after the massacre, in which several were killed and several hundred injured, Thomas Love Peacock wrote of it to his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley in Italy. Shelley was so moved by Peacock’s description of the events that he responded by penning The Masque of Anarchy, a poem that advocates both radical social action and non-violent resistance: “Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you- / Ye are many — they are few”.

At times of upheaval and unrest, is poetry’s role to fan the flames or cool tempers? Down the centuries it has proved remarkably effective at both. Against a background of civil unrest in 1970s America, Gil Scott-Heron told the world “you will not be able to stay home, brother”. In his searing, satirical masterpiece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” on the album Small Talk at 125th and Lennox. Scott-Heron offers a line in tightly-wrought comic surrealism; “The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.” But it is as much his delivery, his voice impassioned but not quite righteous, that electrifies the poem.”

As the sky goes darker by the hour
The coloured leaves all turn to neutral black
The branches look like writing in a script
The sense of which no human can unpack.

Does God write Hebrew with his fingertip?
Does he speak in algebraic form?
Or being there before we humans came
Must we struggle ,mysteries to discern?

For languages evolved from grunts and squeaks
From birdsong and the lapping of sea waves.
Evolution takes much longer than we think
As on our genes, new systems are engraved.

And if God is the origin and source
He does not speak in English or in Greek.
His being  shows both  subtlety and force
A whisper in the wind , a mountain bleak

Our God can never win the Nobel Prize
Beyond ,beneath,the source who underlies.

I looked at my data and for the first time the European Union is the biggest number in   my visitors list, just beating my delightful  friends in the USA.
I don’t know why that should  be unless WP has  amalgamated countries like France,Germany etc.And no doubt His Majesty is peering at me wondering who is telling me what is no good and what should be kept! I’ll see him in my dreams where we clean the oven and  look after hundreds of magical cats which stops us going out.So far he  has not spoken much but that is not unusual.

True anguish hides her face  in times like these
Where  hate and anger blend  and  are appeased.
Where   men and women hesitate to speak
Gomorrah,Sodom,waltz, ah, Viennese.
By this display  we judge  the future bleak.
The spirits freed by  disbelief now freeze.
Atheism turns,till paganism it greets.

For humans need a myth by which to live
To say God’s dead no energy will  give.
From reawakened  pagan gods   comes  power.
Energy,  the psychopath deals  with.
Comes the man and comes the evil hour.
He sees no  problems ,asks none to forgive.
Frees the  taunting demons from their towers

Does he think he’s god and can control
The men of  darkness gathering their haul?
I fear he sees less than a beggar poor
Who leans defenceless by an empty wall
And in the wall ,there is no open door.
Yet there is a trap, a drop. a jail.
Tortures thought historic  are adored.

Against  sadness:no-one here must weep
Nor lounge  about in melancholy deep
Was Van Gogh senseless to permit  his muse.
For  even masterpieces  ,was the price too steep?
We see the yellow chair  but not his views
Nor his  mind where technique made great leaps.
Nor was his journey broadcast on the news.
Against sadness.

Happiness  or joy is hard to find
When we rest, the News preys on our minds
Yet some are  cold  towards the slaughtered priest
His nose a beak of bone  in old  face   lined
Now Muslims go to Mass and join Christ’s feast
Against sadness.

What rages in the mind make men  kill thus?
In Syrian wars  the  innocents fare worse.
But these are our near neighbours so we weep
And wonder how to end the  frightening curse
The sins we once committed hold us deep
We  hold our hands out wanting to be nursed
Against sadness

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2738/real-spanish-omelette

To myself,I look quite young  and daring
I wear my clothes of pink and purple lush.
My silver hair looks blonde like Helen Mirren’s
Except that mine looks  like it  needs a  wash

I wear my clothes of pink and purple lush.
My shoes are purple too I must confess
My beauteous hair looks like a  great  thorn bush.
My vest is moth-holed, like my winter  dress

 
My shoes are purple too I must confess
Purple heather   covers Northern  moors
My hat is  purple, like my winter  dress
Some use  such heather as a mattress coarse.

 
Purple heather  dresses Northern  moors
Higher than the  fiercest sheep will go
Some use  such heather as a mattress coarse
Beware of  rabid rams  so wild they  roar.

To myself,I look quite lined   yet caring
I wear my clothes of pink and purple  loose
My silver hair looks  unlike Helen Mirren’s
I bet she never wears a baggy fleece!

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/pantoum-poetic-form

Quote:A good example of the pantoum is Carolyn Kizer’s “Parent’s Pantoum,” the first three stanzas of which are excerpted here:

     Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

     More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

     They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group—why don’t they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

Some folk are made of rubber
Some folk are made of glass
And when the stormy winds blow
Rubber lets it pass.

Yes and No
You Me It They We
Foreigners
English
EU
Trump
Vote
Tabloids
Humour?
Democracy
Satire?