https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/why-teaching-poetry-is-so-important/360346/

In M and S they have got full-length nightgowns with long sleeves and cowl necks.So it seems that while we can go out in jeans and T shirts, we will go to bed in what looks like a nun’s habit.~
I often wondered what was the habit of this nun?Biting her nails. beating  unmarried mothers? Going gambling in dens of iniquity?
Anyway, seems to me this nightdress would be just the thing to go to Tesco’s in if you waken up  at 3 am worried you have no cauliflower ears left in the house.
They also are selling cashmere dressing gown for £199.Seems like modesty and wealth are on the rise.You could have fooled me.I can tell you it’s cheaper to go to bed naked except it’s awkward if anyone rings the doorbell.
I wear a nightdress in summer and two in winter as I can’t have anything heavy on top of me like a thick duvet.
So if you have arthritis or you have no heater wear more clothes in bed.But not the ones you were to go out in.Some people wear thermal underwear in bed.Rather cruel if you sleep with a lover but you might find it turns them on and that will warm you up!
If they don’t like it ask them to buy you a cashmere and silk.That will be a test of love!
I can’t stay here writing all night.I have to wash up.
Cheers

How like a jail, this wooden cubicle
Where I am paid to sit and calculate.
Since my ambition was more musical
The lack I feel aids Satan and his mates

All day I enter figures into rows
Or into columns vertical and neat
The walls seem  nearer and I am disposed
To get my coat and race off down the street.

Yet I need the money  to pay rent
To buy my food and go to Southwold Pier
In truth it is like Hell and I am bent
By living as if nothing true were here.

I need to find the space in my own mind
Where dreams can linger till I am less blind

 

Before you send that email,stop and muse
Do not shoot the arrow poison tipped
Why so hurt a friend for differing views?

The vulnerable, the lonely,how we choose
To  pass the suffering on, in words encrypt
Before you send that email,stop and muse.

When we do evil, we our virtue lose.
See  mouths down-turned with narrow tensed up lips.
Why gravely hurt someone  with differing views?

You may have got a match,don’t light the fuse.
Might you be more  gentle,  less abrupt?
Before you send that email,pause to  muse.

Earth may burn and  human hearts may freeze
Does that mean that we must be corrupt?
We’ll stretch our minds instead to hear all views

Our dear heart,our own sin will corrupt
We will suffer  most from our descent
Before you send that email,stop and muse.
Why gravely hurt yourself when you can choose?

 

1.Listen properly when people talk to you.
2.Only talk about worthwhile or funny topics.
3.Never seek revenge or retaliation
4 Hug people if it is appropriate
5.Reveal,don’t hide, your love.
6.Remember people can’t read your mind
7 But your body language can often be read
8.Show respect to others.
9.Some people are hard to relate to and it is probably not entirely your fault.
10 Some people are too weak to apologise.Don’t be one of them.

Unnoticed is that moment seasons change
Summer heat seems vanished in  a day
The early darkness  startling,eerie, strange

From the golden sun sadly estranged
Grief descends , we miss our flowers and play
Unnoticed is that moment seasons change

The long days  give us time to take the stage;
Time to go out in the evening air.
The early darkness  strikes us, eerie, strange

Like a thrown ball  falls from height of range
A turning point for gravity  lives there,
Unnoticed is that moment seasons change

Now our seasonal clothing is exchanged
Out come hats and coats in colours grayed
The early darkness  seems  less eerie, strange

Oh, we cry, come back  those glorious days!
We’re like children,  who for sweeties pray.
In  a  single moment, seasons change
Into  darkness, our own sun is plunged

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/27/robert-mccrum-books-walt-whitman

“In the absence of an explanation for Whitman’s creative leap forward – was it, perhaps, the fruit of his service in the civil war as a hospital orderly working in terrible battlefield conditions? – most biographers have retired, baffled. Even Whitman’s champion, the sage of Boston, RW Emerson, seems to have understood that this extraordinary new voice had undergone a mysterious and secret gestation. “I salute you at the beginning of a great career,” wrote Emerson, acknowledging Leaves of Grass, “which yet must have a long foreground somewhere.””

 

 

“But the ruthless cut-off of 40 does not address the complex trajectory of creative growth: for every novelist or poet who explodes skywards with a first or second book, there are many who only achieve mastery as they reach the shady side of the slope. The onset of middle age, or the approach of oblivion, is perhaps as sharp a spur to literary effort as the intoxicating self-belief of youth.

Daniel Defoe completed Robinson Crusoe just before his 60th birthday, after a turbulent life as a journalist. Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn aged 49. Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in his mid-40s. Closer to home, Mary Wesley launched The Camomile Lawn at 70. Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, this year’s American literary sensation, a Vietnam novel of astonishing power and insight, worked on his manuscript for 33 years and finally saw it published in his 60s. He now enjoys rather more recognition than the Oxford poet Craig Raine, who has just published his first novel, Heartbreak, aged 65.

The artistic provenance of these late bloomers will be as complex as Whitman’s, but I think Dr Raine’s title gives a clue to one common thread: these books are invariably love stories, in the broadest sense, inspired by a person or a memory – in Twain’s case, of the Mississippi – for whom the writer calls up one final surge of creative energy.