As we cross the ghost filled plains of  ancient wars
Which cover most of Europe with their scars.
How can I compare  my losing one I love
When screaming poppies  haunt  below , above?
The Jews reciting Kaddish   made to walk
To death chambers where  only Evil  talked
When gypsies ,gays and  women big with child
Died grotesquely  in a  Europe big on style

Can anaemia arrive by loss and grief
The red blood cells are flat in disbelief
Too large to penetrate the body cells
No oxygen to feed the brain that tells.

The macro-sized red blood cells well with grief
They cannot weep nor obtain true relief
They knock out other cells as they go past
And in  these cells the memory ever lasts

The doctor at the clinic gives out pills
Folic acid with  gripe water swilled
Cortisone to heal the raw red flesh
But in the mind, the memories burn and  flash

Every cell desires to live and do its task
Can they be deceived by any mask?

I don’t feel a void inside myself
Despite the loss of my companion
While he was alive he gave me wealth

Is  a marriage  needed for our health?
They go but their soul is never done
I don’t feel a void inside myself

Widowed,lonely ,crippled and bereft
My confidence has never been full on
While he was alive he gave me wealth

Half blind, yet I see by my own stealth
One can live with  confidence  or none
I don’t feel a void inside myself

Sometimes now I feel I have no self
But God has got me in his winged span
My lover was alive and gave me wealth

Dear Lord, I do feel lonesome just for him
I washed his feet and poured the oil  there on
I don’t feel a void but give me help
So  I can decipher all the wealth

Is Poetry Therapeutic? Define Your Terms!

“Certainly readers should refrain from pop-culture-informed psychoanalysis of poets based upon a poem, or even on a collection of poems. The poet may be playing, taking on a persona, hiding behind a mask, recounting historical narrative. It is also true that writing a really excellent poem takes considerable effort far beyond whatever initial expressive urge prompted the piece. And many terrific poems emerge from almost arbitrary prompting rather than from some inner need to rant, emote, reveal the ego, or unpack a trauma. Poets don’t write themselves into sanity. They may confront the void, articulate fears, challenge external and internal authorities, channel grief, and tell stories; but poets who begin writing for reasons of therapeutic expression are usually people already inclined to love the rhythm, music, imagery, wordplay and magical rhetoric of language. Read interviews with poets. The proof is there.”

I’m getting penicillin tomorrow
For I’ve got a UTI bad
I thought I’d gone crazy
And dreadfully lazy
When the germs took a hold in my head.

I could not find my kindle reader
And I’ve cancelled the Guardian off line
I tried  reading the cereal box
And to sort out all my odd socks
But my head was not fiy to design

Now I must wait for the delivery
In the morning their van will come round
I cannot walk there
Although it’s not all that far
I expect after that I’ll  feel grand

The world is exists but I just wish to flee
The flowers come into bud but I can’t see.
The birds have built their new   small nests again
Birds forget, but memory feeds our pain.

When I get trapped inside this mud black silt
I forget the tools my mind has lately  built
Again it feels eternal and unkind
The sorrowing  fills the endless realms of mind.

The mind  helps us to mediate and muse
We need it to give weight to different views
But   inwardness can  build up dangerous walls
We lose ourselves in shadow  and may fall.

The life within us will rise up again
If  we  can accept our mental pain.

Image by Mike Flemming.Copyright

Inside the Mind of Poetry

“The greatest lines in poetry are infinitely quotable while having no definite meaning. What is a mind of winter, and why must one have one? It doesn’t matter. Wallace Stevens’ greatness lay in his ability to produce these kinds of anti-aphorisms, seemingly wise but ultimately ungraspable: Thought is false happiness. She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. And, most pointedly: The poem must resist the intelligence / almost successfully. (Or, nay, successfully!)

I believe that to read poetry, one must have a mind of poetry. You must enter a state where you come to understand meaning-resistant arrangements of language as having their own kind of meaning. It’s quite similar to those Magic Eye posters from the ‘90s: If you haven’t figured out how to look at them, you can’t believe that anyone really sees the dolphin. (This metaphor has its limits, making learned skill seem like an on/off conversion; too, with poetry, even when you’ve mastered “the trick,” not everyone sees the same thing.)”