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.

I’m in deep now,never been this deep before
The world’s hollow like a shell and I’m out its door.
In so deep, the ocean has its own startled floor.
I’m down,down.down.never been so dark , so more

I can’t rightly tell how I got where I am
I think I had an accident,fell over, then I swam.
Sometimes it’s a loss, be times it’s a man.
I guess I only do it cos I know some folk can.

I don’t know if the joy is worth the pain
Would I choose to relive it if I was born again?
The deep joy is the amazing gain.
But the sorrow is  damn sad, let’s admit it plain.

I’m in deep and it’s over my head
What was I thinking of,when I fell  out of that bed?
I look up and  the sea’s so  turquoise like  that mist is red
When we get good and mad and wish some loon was dead.

At first, it was all just black,black pain
But from the bottom of the  well, I looked up with awed love again.
That’s when I recalled,feelings are sweet and sane
Joy is much greater when we’re in the deep,deep zone.

I dunno if I’m  ever comin’ out.
We can’t control it,ain’t that what life’s all about?
I’ll never love with innocence again,nor not feel doubt.
But I’m no teapot and the devil ain’t got my spout.

I’m swimming and the ocean’s so   mysteriously bright
Down here we don’t have no day nor no night
Fish nudge me with  big grins  and teeth white
Sea flowers fondle me and whisper,turn off that light

Source: Whitewebbs: Ducks, Heron and Turtles

Hand knitted as my villanelle today
My language has got stuck in some time past
Being Sunday, I desire to prey

My  sentence hangs  like washing spread on hay
My language needs some air in a great blast
Arthritic is my villanelle today

Hunting, fighting,making an affray
I make the Headlines look like worms  outcast
Being Sunday, I desire to prey

My main emotion is a  proud dismay
I was not worthy of the National Trust
Cosmetic is my villanelle today

If only Princess Di had  turned men gay
The Prince and all his courtiers’ could not fuss.
Grieving Sunday, I desired to pray

If only bread was made to heal the curse.
And wine was poured to calm all human breasts
Comedic was my villanelle, in play
Oh, life is sweet, I  love my lady gay

The only way to keep the kitchen floor completely clean is by dying.
Life =Dirt.
Dirt=soil,
Soil = plants
Soil =crops=food
No soil=death

Chaos :The Roman writer Ovid gave Chaos its modern meaning; that of an unordered and formless primordial mass.

Highly thought of Cambridge historian Mary Beard has been  viviously attacked on Twitter  for suggesting some Roman soldiers here may have been black

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/roman-britain-black-white/

All the symbols in a rage
Came dancing off the printed page
The letters Greek that used to be
Mathematics, Poetry
The Hebrew Aleph’s coterie.
The keys these symbols were to be
To other worlds and other seas.
And in my blankness, I’d denied
That there was more than just one side.
The symbols coloured and engaged
Felt too threatened by my cage.
And so they entered dreams and thoughts
Until my mind and heart were caught
Then I gave them equal rights
And they gave me some new insights
I’d trespassed in their sacred space
For logic, beauty left no space.
For love, for life, in gratitude
I review my attitudes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/how-to-read-poetry-a-step-by-step-guide/380657/

“Try to meet a poem on its terms not yours. If you have to “relate” to a poem in order to understand it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. In other words, don’t try to fit the poem into your life. Try to see what world the poem creates. Then, if you are lucky, its world will help you re-see your own.”

https://www.writingforward.com/poetry-writing/poetry-writing-tips

The  white streaked evening clouds hung like draped  sheets
Momentous like a sign of  pain and rage
Now night has come embroidered with deceit

And I was filled with dangerous conceit
That I myself   created this great  stage
The  white streaked evening clouds hung like draped  sheets

The sun has drowned  itself in waters deep
And shines from  beds of seas unknown and aged
Now night has come embroidered with deceit

So all is monotone and thus discreet
The man by his wife’s grave  in silence prays
The  white streaked evening clouds hang like draped  sheets

There is no moon , this darkness to complete
And all the colours in the  house are greyed
Now night has come embroidered with deceit

Pride and envy have this love decayed
And therefore its offspring are long delayed
The  white streaked evening clouds hung like  marriage  sheets
Thus night has come embroidered with deceit

A kidney  infection makes oldies seem crazed
Delirium ,visions and rushes of rage
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

A lack of agility  means we can’t dance
And musing  all day sends us into a trance
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

We seem to get shorter and fatter as well
I can’t ride my bike as my eyes are unwell
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

I’ve forgotten the topology  and shape of a  man
I’ve burned  the front table and eight non-stick pans
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

The doctor helped me up a when I lay on the couch
He pressed on my kidneys and I gave a shout
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

More  polite  than the English,  more white than the Scots
They come here to help us as we need them  lots
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

As poetic as Snowdon, as rhythmic as flow
The Welsh suffered so when they closed the old coal
Is it wonderful being so old and gay?
Is it wonderful being so old?

I don’t feel so well as mi Mam used to say
I can’t kneel down easy so now I can’t pray
Is it wonderful leading old fogeys astray?
Yeah, it’s wonderful being so old

Too old for cold, I stand, now against the hedge,
Watching the snowflakes in the glare of neon street lights.
Darkness has come early, and I think of country uplands and huddled sheep.
On Salisbury Plain, shepherds watched their flocks
Just as in Bethlehem two thousand years before,
And then, exactly when?
“Between the wars” it stopped. Now we know there is no “Between the wars”.
And who decided
To cull the sheep and shepherds and the space for kindness?
Now that same Plain still exists ,but banned
And closed to human-kind,
For bombs , not wombs
Nor for birth of lamb ,nor gypsy child, nor Saviour
Where would He go today

If you go down to Urgent Care, do not be surprised
The doctor’s from Siberia, and he has kindly eyes
Or sometimes they’re from Timbuctoo, and dark as Eden’s wise.
Yet if they flee from our madness, our weekend care may die.

I felt so bad, I thought it’s nerves, but no, my kidney’s  tried.
The panic and the nasty thoughts will soon be  overlaid
The Trimopethrin  will cure me; I will now survive
So no more visits no more stress , thank God I am alive.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/poetry-and-ruthless-caree_n_490451.html

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n23/tom-paulin/entrepreneurship

“Hughes’s prose in his letters is always urgent and compulsive, but there are moments of tender observation, as in a letter to Edna Wholey in 1950, where he says he

heard a commotion in the hedge, and after a while, out trundled a hedgehog, merry as you like, and obviously out for a good time. I thought he might make a jolly companion for an evening so I brought him in. After a while I noticed he had disappeared and later heard a noise just like the sobbing of a little child, but very faint, and it continued for long enough. I traced it to a pile of boxes, and there was my comrade, with his nose pressed in a pool of tears, and his face all wet, and snivelling and snuffling his heart out. I could have kissed him for compassion. I don’t know why I’m so sympathetic towards hedgehogs.

Such moments are like dummy runs for poems, and they remind us of the animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.

Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s early undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1952, when, writing to his sister, Olwyn, he says that sometimes he thinks Cambridge is ‘wonderful’, at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent for ‘clarity simplicity and power’ (note the lack of commas as in ‘mud water fire and air’). Swift’s writing is ‘the bedrock from which every writer must start’.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/04/in_praise_of_difficult_poetry.html