The snow  shall cover all contempt and wrath
The world is beautiful  without our sin
The vices that make demons writhe and laugh

The snow has made a blanket. signal of
How we stop and then we start again
The snow  shall cover all contempt and wrath

As it is  below so it’s above
The deep clouds  hide the sky and war planes’ din
Killing by design makes  demons  laugh

When  we see the Breughel Icarus
We  learn that suffering pricks more than a pin
Yet snow  shall cover evil and  God’s wrath

Snow may cover like our mother’s love
But perhaps we need to learn to bear our pain
And kick  those demons  off our human path

Yet until the sun begins to wane
Let’s  enjoy the beauty without blame
The snow  shall cover our contempt and wrath
The vices that make  us humans lose our love

• We often went to sinner parties
• His eyes  showed he was contrite.
  We entertained without knowing it.
  I am the widow of his soul
  As Catholics we were forbidden to use crampons
  Contravention is not allowed in the marriage bed
  Now silence is folded and love seems dead
  He was worth the surprise of life.
  She stares with eyes like green diamonds.Esmeralda!
  Stop and tell the roses
  He blessed the waters as they froze… and he got bitten by the  toads.
  I fill the bends in time with laughter
  With me it’s rhyme after time.Line after line
  Rhyme still wounds those with no skin.
  A savage groan is soon lost into the ocean.
  Did you ever get that dramatic feeling?
  What a hole!I bet you’re reeling.
  Take it back, it’s too revealing.
  With a face like yours, you need concealing
  My figure didn’t add up to more than 90 inches.
  A  skit on logic is the death of hope.

I know that's how death will come,
Suddenly flying into another orbit
when you are photographing flowers.
It's not a gentle transition.
No-one will know where you've gone.
One step wrong and you're.
off the high wire
And plunging into the no safety net.
Flying for a while;
Jumping into hyperspace,spinning electrons
Startle your grey eyes.
Transiting the new black sun
You're on a double gold helix,
Spider on your web,
Knitting furiously
Into the future heaven on gossamer wings.
Butterfly goodbye,I'm off to see the stars.
And the black holes.No one will come with me.
I'm shaking off,evaporating into mist.
I'm a flying saucer on a circus mission.
I can't say no to a new invitation.
Make it fast and break with tradition.
Time is passing smoothly till that break
In the music,I've been transmuted into a different key
someone else will play me on their violin
I'm a tune,
I'm a thought,
I'm a whisper in your vision.
Goodbye,darling.I'm under orders
Ready to leave for my performance
On the electric carpet.
Death dancing to a tune on a violoncello,
Arpeggionne sonata
I'm playing your words upside down
In a new foreign translation,
Accompanied by solo artists,ice cracking
I'm going in.It's too sudden.
I'm flying.
Spinning faster to amuse the clowns,
too many ups and no downs.
I'm going right out of orbit
I've broken the pull of gravity,
And fly with pure equanimity
Into my future life,
I'm off at some moment,
An instant ,a crack,a loud smack.
That was me passing,

Shropshire UK

Oh,milk pan thank you for the joy
When I  sip my  Horlicks  here.
You have never set on fire
Nor exploded  in your ire
For I burned you by mistake
When I wrote a poem one  night
Yet when I have cleaned you up
No-one would  guess there was mishap
Unlike the dangerous non-stick pans
I have destroyed eight or nine
For I have to harm some  thing
Since my husband went missing
Better far to break a plate
Than to fall into a lake
Without conscious plan or thought
I broke all  those mugs he bought
And I broke the wedding gifts
Eight green bowls and sugar sieves
Still I have not burned a cake
Though my hands do rather ache
My joints are swollen like my head
I think I’d  better go to bed
Otherwise I might  confess
That  last night I wore a dress
A summer navy with white stripes
On my body of delight
So  now I’ve told you  of my sin
I hope you will not tell my kin
For they think I am a  saint
My reputation  has no taint
But in secret I am bad,
When a girl I loved a lad
Now I’m older I still do
To be honest,I love two.
One is from  the North York Moors
The other’s foreign,I am sure
For unlike  cold English folk
I’m his cat and he  me strokes
He cannot speak except in code
I understand it’s  very rude.
Since he’s   only 93
I hope that he will outlast me
As for that braw Yorkish man
I’ll get another woman in
Then we’ll live like animals
As a  little group of pals.
We’ll pray for mercy as we’re old
We want fun  before we’re cold

The Northern lights

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/12/hopeful-images-from-2017/547931/

  A year of shock , a year of awe
We will look and say a prayer
So small amid this world of light
Let  our sorrow shape our heart
Then we will with wider view
See all things are made anew
Nothing lives without our care
Love and Mercy shall dwell here
Digest the  painful  and the good
Respect the heart and shed no  blood
In the end we all shall die
Kiss the moment as it flies

A philosopher who spoke well in Greek
Said Latin is not up my street.
So  she bought a new map
Which she glued to her lap
Tantrum ergo, her Latin now speaks.

Her view of topology was bleak
As her hatred of rubber was leaked
So  she bought a rubber mattress
And roamed the street mapless.
For she wanted a goose  that could speak

Her duvet was  filled with fake down
As were her nightdress and gown
So she kept herself healthy
Upbraiding the wealthy
And washing her verbs with her nouns.

She had books in the wardrobe and bath
Which filled  bother  her sisters with wrath
So she cut off her hair
And married the chair
We all   suffered from  a good laugh

Van Gogh and Picasso hung near
And ,How to make love without fear.
Otherwise it was Goethe
Who had never hurt her
As she fantasied him drinking beer.

Impressionism  made  this lady feel good
The tulips were made of fake wood
The poppies were many
But she didn’t pick any
Though under the impression she could

Nonsense Poetry

Extract

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine.

Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs, does not seem to have been common. This gives a special position to Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just been edited by Mr R. L. Megroz[1], who was also responsible for the Penguin edition a year or two before the war. Lear was one of the first writers to deal in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and made-up words, without any satirical purposes. His poems are not all of them equally nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a perversion of logic, but they are all alike in that their underlying feeling is sad and not bitter. They express a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy with whatever is weak and absurd. Lear could fairly be called the originator of the limerick, though verses in almost the same metrical form are to be found in earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered a weakness in his limericks — that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same in the first and last lines — is part of their charm. The very slight change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be spoiled if there were some striking surprise. For example:

There was a young lady of Portugal
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree
To examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.

It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear’s have been both printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he is really seen at his best in certain longer poems, such as ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ or ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’:

On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

Later there appears a lady with some white Dorking hens, and an inconclusive love affair follows. Mr Megroz thinks, plausibly enough, that this may refer to some incident in Lear’s own life. He never married, and it is easy to guess that there was something seriously wrong in his sex life. A psychiatrist could no doubt find all kinds of significance in his drawings and in the recurrence of certain made-up words such as “runcible”. His health was bad, and as he was the youngest of twenty-one children in a poor family, he must have known anxiety and hardship in very early life. It is clear that he was unhappy and by nature solitary, in spite of having good friends.

Aldous Huxley, in praising Lear’s fantasies as a sort of assertion of freedom, has pointed out that the ‘They’ of the limericks represent common sense, legality and the duller virtues generally. ‘They’ are the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing. For instance:

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, ‘It’s absurd
To encourage this bird!’
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly the kind of thing that ‘They’ would do. Herbert Read has also praised Lear, and is inclined to prefer his verse to that of Lewis Carroll, as being purer fantasy. For myself, I must say that I find Lear funniest when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of burlesque or perverted logic makes its appearance. When he gives his fancy free play, as in his imaginary names, or in things like ‘Three Receipts for Domestic Cookery’, he can be silly and tiresome. ‘The Pobble Who Has No Toes’ is haunted by the ghost of logic, and I think it is the element of sense in it that makes it funny. The Pobble, it may be remembered, went fishing in the Bristol Channel:

He told me he loved me before the tide over-took us
His hands seem to twitch all over me and he trembled with tears of mirth
He was the most underrated blogger of his entire degeneration
His words felt like raindrops on toast.
His talent was unmarketable Round his genius a sorrow in the dark
His eyes gleamed like traffic signals stuck on ” no go”
His writing was hard to put down
He never told me his time frame but I watched him covertly on my swatch
He told me I was named in his bills.I had overspent his money.He divorced me and I over responded by shooting him with my bow and arrow.All things may go round the bend

Tell people you can’t log onto Amazon
Never order eggs online especially human ones
Do not wear a watch, look at your phone
Don’t wear socks with sandals
Roll up a newspaper and pretend to hit people with it.
Smile and look faraway.
Do not  order pizza on the phone
Don’t eat Weetabix banana flavoured
Use full fat milk
Use butter
Drink cream
Keep saying,  je suis ici, madame/monsieur.
I like faux creme caramel.

Wear a kilt,collar and tie under a very old tweed jacket
Don’t keep your nails clean
Don’t express interest in Albert Camus ; who?
Polish your shoes nightly
Wear  old  nasty socks with  those weird short trousers
Don”t wear trench coats especially in bed or if dead or in the Army
Take a  talking cat out on your shoulder.
When out with friends do not ask what hermeutics is.And don’t ask in bed.Ask your Rabbi as Christianity is a  heresy of Judaisn so we are all entitled to speak to  the nearest Rabbi unless they have fled from anti-Semitisim
Wear a fake fur dressing  gown all day
Don’t appear intelligent
Walk round  square parks screaming Pi.? och aye
Talk about cricket and snooker as much as you can
Never tell your partner you adore them.
Always get married before sexual activity including to yourself.
What this old rubbish,? Be  off

The editor

Erich Fromm

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/race

Once I saw the face within your face
Vulnerable and lower than an ant
An image that fits many of our race
The human  seeing that forever haunts

The face within your face is  on my mind
As I think of Christmas and choose  gifts
I recollect the cruelty of our lives
When too much fighting did create deep rifts.

Often masks are fixed with superglue
The psychic rival sees no other view
We may have no one else to show them to
The pain of lying pierces us right through.

Yet we can’t live  now with no mask to hide
The vulnerable, the trembling heart inside

Haaretz.com

The world on fire

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68606/spiritual-poetry

“The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.

But, no, I’ve been asked to choose, to recommend. The poems I suggest here are this moment’s choices, not “the best spiritual poems” (a phrase weighing nothing in so intimate and personal a context). The “gates” are an equally personal selection of entrance points into spiritual life. Some of the poems are well known, others less so. Each stands representative of many others. Each also, for me, plunges into the heart of the matter at hand, bearing witness in some essential way.

GATE 1. PERMEABILITY
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?) [translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]
The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of Buddhist awakening. This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.

The poem, by the greatest woman poet of classical-era Japan, is one I first encountered in 1986 while working with Mariko Aratani, my co-translator for The Ink Dark Moon. At first, I had the poem’s words, I had the poem’s grammar, but its meaning eluded. Once it clarified, this became for me a life-altering poem, transforming my relationship to safety, permeability, awakening, and the mouth of the lion.

Che Fece… Il Gran Refiuto

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.

C.P. Cavafy (Alexandria, 1863-1933) [translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]
Cavafy is not generally thought of as a spiritual poet. This early poem’s precipitating title comes from a story about a pope, as told by Dante, but that is not the reason it is here. Nor can I say I even fully understand the poem—the phrase “the right no” has been, for me, a decades-long riddle and harvest. But Cavafy’s basic proposal, that a person carries within himself or herself a great Yes or great No, requiring declaration—this surely is one gate to the spiritual dimension.

You let me see the face within your face
So vulnerable, so touching. eyes of pain
No posturing no masking, no mistake.

You did not wish to share a kind embrace
As trauma may revisit you again
You let me see the face within your face

Inside us is our heart, which others break
With their false love, when truth is what they feign
No posturing no masking, no mistake

Sensitive to what is merely faked
Agony is etched into your brain
You let me see the face within your face

Having been insulted’s no disgrace
Yet all alone, we ‘re victims of our brains
No posturing no masking, no mistake

For  humans there’s an insult set in train
When, powerless, we struggle but in vain
You let me see the face within your face
No posturing no bluster, I was graced.

At three o’clock,  we ran  across  the park
Then up the Wigan Road, three children roamed
Passed the houses and along the fields
Looking for our daddy coming home
Looking for our daddy coming home.

I was only three  or four at most
We passed our church and  saw the Pope in Rome
We climbed a fence and walked by fields of wheat
Looking for our daddy coming home
Looking for our daddy coming home.

From the distance came a tall thin man
A ladder on his shoulder, hair well combed
A bucket full of paints and  all his tools
Look, Paul, is that daddy coming home?
Bernard, I think daddy’s coming home!

A  look of shock, a smile, a cry, my loves!
He  rushed towards us,  happy  and transformed
What about your mammy does she know?
Yes, yes, yes it’s daddy coming home
Yes, yes, yes, it’s daddy coming home.

• Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare—never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
  • Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955).

By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of “order.” The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.

Erich Fromm  in Credo

Cred

If we do not grieve,  we lose  much more
The favourite gifts, the symbols of those gone
Emotions blocked will close the mind’s front door

In reverie, grief wanders  rooms and floors
But blocked, we are alone in only one.
If we cannot grieve then we lose more

Cut off from our own self, we lose  allure
So we are lonely, even as we win
Emotions blocked will trap us with’ steel doors

After  weeping, there’s an empty core
The onion peeled, reveals a tear alone
If we cannot grieve then we lose more

Yet emptiness creates a  new space dear,
An indolence  on fire to which bees come
Emotions blocked will close the mind’s own door

As we have little time till beetles own
Let us dwell in  love’s creative zones
If we cannot grieve, we can’t adore
For God is locked behind our  iron doors

Love of one’s country which does not include love for humankind as such is nothing but idolatry

Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving [see link below to pdf file]

Click to access the%20art%20of%20loving.pdf