Day: May 24, 2018
The hand that casts it

“The fragrance of the rose lingers on the hand that casts it.”
Wm Shakespeare


After 3 years exactly ,I have lit the lamp
The lamp shade on another base.
Broken by your fall, the last you had
The lamp and base separated evermore
But now the light shines through the shade, I’m glad
I feel the love is lit deep in my core
The base stands all alone no more to be
Except for its own beauty and its grace
Reminders of those journeys to the sea
Aldeburgh beach and joyfilled face.
So on these parts, once unified, shall live
I need not throw them out with rubbish and old tins
The shade gives shadows I’m familiar with
The rounded base has boldly its self shown
What once was one has now become two parts
Each of them gives solace to my heart
Transport for London and the disabled
I just spoke to them about the inaccessibility of my local train station
I got the answer: it is expensive to make them accessible to the Government have given them till 2030 to do the work.By then I might be dead.
Moorfields Hospital is next to this train line but I’d have to get a cab and the traffic is hell.
Old or pregnant people forced to stand at bus stop en route for hospital
Maybe a bath could be installed instead of a seat.The seats are uncomfortable
Extract
Joan Jagger, 70, above, retired foster carer
“I’m furious. I use the buses all the time if I want to go to Camden or the West End. But I have arthritis and back problems and if I have to stand up for too long it’s agony. The seats are essential for people like me. You can also put your shopping on them to save bending down. Only one person wanted the seats taken away because she said kids were congregating here but since the CCTV camera was put up there is no problem. We were never asked first, and we want them back straight away.”
Olivia Leun, 36, who works in the Fortune Food café next to the bus stop
“Everyone’s very angry about it. We’re raising a petition to TfL to bring the seats back. They didn’t consult anybody first, they just took them away. There’s a lot of elderly people and pregnant women who need to sit down. We would like to let them sit in the shop but we can’t for insurance reasons. As a community we need to sort this out. There used to be trouble here but not any more, now there’s a camera right there. It doesn’t make sense.”
Problems of painters and poets
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/wallace-stevens-problems-painters-and-poets
Extract
“Stevens first delivered “Relations Between Poetry and Painting” as a lecture at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951. In this piece, Stevens explored the parallel attributes of poetry and painting, beginning with reference to adages that apply to both poets and painters and culminating with the emphatic conclusion that “it would be tragic not to realize the extent of man’s dependence on the arts.”
This crescendo in his argument is based on the notion that, in an age of disbelief, the arts in general are a “compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.” Stevens argues that, because poetry and painting operate at the juncture between imagination and reality, these arts assume a prophetic stature and become a “vital assertion of self in a world where nothing but the self remains, if that remains.””