To hate is linked to overwhelming fear
We fear intrusion and the sharing too.
Fear of closeness creates a black  veneer

Those we love ,we might  too well admire
That throws us into envy and the blues
To hate is linked to overwhelming fear

We wish to be the  better and aspire
To win the  prize, to wield no more the plough
Fear of closeness creates a false  veneer

Yet were we more at ease and more secure
We’d have kind interest in how our rivals do
To hate is linked to overwhelming fear

The end of envy, malice so desired
Brings all down, destroys the world anew
Fear of closeness creates a false  veneer

Hate is sad unless we’ve love  in view
A rhythm of  real connection  should be glue
To hate is linked to fear we can’t endure
Our poor heart hides beneath a thick  veneer

http://www.bostoneveningtherapy.com/2016/06/rising-above-personality-disorder-the-creativity-of-sylvia-plath/

Too many ions in the fire
Too many hooks in the  broth
Too many photons at the Opera.
Too many raves on the shore.
Too many lies in the pyre.
Are you positron, doctor?
The nuclei try my eye

Paralysed by dread, my hand was still
Afraid to make a mark on a blank page.
I thought to make it move by force of will

I measured with my finger joints, [new skill]
Then with my charcoal,l I became engaged
Tormented  by  sheer dread, my hand moved still

With charcoal, pencil, fountain pen or quill
Human  down the ages  have portrayed
I tried to make it move by my own will

My body sweated  like  a waterfall well full
My eyes gazed and my  mind became engaged
Touched by dread, my hand moved like a bull.

I’d measured, so I let it rush about unlulled
My eyes were  pleased with this dramatic page
I’m glad I made it move by choosing will

And so I am at one with every age
Promiscuous is  my love  but well arranged
Paralysed by dread, my hand was still
Until desire was stronger than my  will

Genesis

Against the burly air I strode,
Where the tight ocean heaves its load,
Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear
Upon the dead weight of the land;
And the waves flourished at my prayer,
The rivers spawned their sand.

And where the streams were salt and full,
The tough pig-headed salmon strove,
Curbing the ebb and the tide’s pull
To reach the steady hills above.

II

The second day I stood and saw
The osprey plunge with triggered claw,
Feathering blood along the shore,
To lay the living sinew bare.

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,
This fierce and unregenerate clay,

Building as a huge myth for man
The watery Leviathan,

And made the glove-winged albatross
Scour the ashes of the sea
Where Capricorn and Zero cross,
A brooding immortality—
Such as the charméd phoenix has
In the unwithering tree.

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost;
And, like a legendary ghost
The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,
Upon pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again
To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.

V

On the sixth day, as I rode
In haste about the works of God,
With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ’s blood are men made free
Though in close shrouds their bodies lie
Under the rough pelt of the sea;

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight
The bones that cannot bear the light.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12217.shtml

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/trust-participation-attitudes-and-happiness

Personality and Attitudes

Income inequality affects people’s personalities and how they perceive themselves and others.

Key findings from the research include:

• People in less equal countries are less likely to believe that most people can be trusted, have less interest in politics, less confidence in their parliament, are more likely to believe that there needs to be more respect for authority, more likely to think that children should be obedient and less likely to believe that children should be independent⁹.

• People in countries with high levels of inequality are more likely to believe that those at the top of their society are competent and those at the bottom are not but have warmer attitudes to those at the bottom than the top. More unequal societies are also more likely to believe that competition between groups leads to competent outcomes¹⁰.

• Research has suggested that people in less equal societies have different personalities. A study found that people in less equal US states were on average less agreeable and less likely to be empathetic, trust people, cooperate or be altruistic¹¹.

https://youtu.be/XXbM9qmJ6VM

The poor live in  tall heaps called tower blocks
Wrapped in tin foil, roasted into dust
See the wild, the wolf, the crow the fox

And for their language or their colour they are mocked.
The government will house them if they must
The poor live in  tall heaps called tower blocks

,Man  is crueller  as he kills for kicks
Slays the gentle hind, her young nonplussed
Colder than the wolf, the crow the fox

An incandescent candle, Grenfell rocked
Gave free light and  heat in its great lust
The poor live in  tall heaps called tower blocks

Into a cruel cycle, they are locked
For hell itself gives them a roaring test
Crueller than the tiger,  crow  or fox

Excitement like the Roman  Games at last
The Greatness of Great Britain has been  lost
The poor live in  tall heaps called tower blocks
Then they leave their dust,  their teeth ;Mass Black

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/geoffrey-hill

“”Hill sought “to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,” according to “”New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. “He deals with violent public events. … Appalled by the moral discontinuities of human behavior, he is also shaken by his own response to them, which mingles revulsion with fascination.”

Both King Log and Mercian Hymns, a series of prose poems combining memories of Hill’s childhood with tales of the eighth-century Mercian king, Offa, are acclaimed for their use of Christian symbolism combined with what Craig Raine called the “high seriousness” of the poet’s style. In a New Statesman review of Mercian Hymns, Raine added that a reader of Hill’s work “can’t miss the noble application of scruples to life. The purged cadences, the bitter medicine of his syntax appeals to the puritan in us: even when the poetry is difficult, obscure and painful to read, we know it is doing us good. It makes no concessions to our intellectual and moral self-esteem.” Hill himself has responded to the oft-leveled charge that his poetry is “difficult”: “In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.” Hill also has said of difficulty, “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. “

I’m looking at you as I knit and sew
In the garden with the rosemary in flower.
I wonder if you’d recognise me now?
Now I can’t look at you
And you can’t look at me
But the loving gaze was a blessing
I  am filled with gratitude
So why am I weeping?

https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/writers/advice/38/a-writers-toolkit/interviews-with-authors/interview-with-george-szirtes

“What advice would you give to an aspiring poet?

Read the best, read a lot, let poems get into your central nervous system. Be prepared to listen, as much to yourself as to others. Poetry is not straight self-expression, telling the world how you feel; it is a mode of feeling that is created by and sustained within language, so get to love words and the patterns they form”

How like a bird’s nest is my unmade bed
As twigs and feathers from my feet did fall.
I ought to take my shoes off, but instead
I leave them on or hurl them at the wall.