Waiting for a sign
Shall I see or hear
Where is the design?
Why do I shed tears.
How can I bear pain
Alone and paralysed
Sitting in the rain
Tears I should have cried.
Why do I hide here?
Why do I feel shame?
God I do not fear
Bless that unnamed Name.
Dissolve me into earth
Let me fertilise
Who decides our worth?
When shall love arise?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/03/first-you-write-sentence-joe-moran-review
“In the first page of this book, Joe Moran quotes Gustave Flaubert’s claim (in a letter to his lover, Louise Colet) that his mind is always “itching” with sentences. Flaubert is Moran’s natural literary authority, because for him literature was style, and style came down to the shape and wording of sentences. Later interpreters might read Madame Bovary as an anatomy of sexual hypocrisy or class conflict or the pains of bourgeois marriage, but what the novelist really cared about were its sentences – their rhythm, their wit, their beauty.
Moran shares Flaubert’s values. His book recommends the pleasures of the well-made sentence, to writers and readers. For both, the sentence is the essential unit of expression. Moran remembers the Struldbruggs, the cursed immortals in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, who as they age lose even the solace of reading, “because their Memory will not serve to carry them from the Beginning of a Sentence to the End”. A sentence is what you hold in your head, whether it be Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust. A sentence is where you make sense of the world.”
“Or, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth put it more succinctly: “If you can’t find anything good to say about anyone, come sit next to me.””
“Lack of friends can be a result of reading signals incorrectly. Many people think other people don’t like them, so they don’t like them in return and thus it goes on and on and before you know it, you hate that person, before you’ve even spoken to them. What I’m about to say sounds tremendously trite, like something you’d find printed on a tea towel in a seaside shop selling awful scented candles, but smiling at someone can be the first step to friendship. It can make someone warm to you, make them like you, because they think you like them.
Friendship favours the brave. Those who aren’t afraid to smile or put a hand out first.”
I’m far too old to write a villanelle
A sonnet or a roundeau or free verse
Besides I know my poetry won’t sell
I have my life and living now to tell
But maybe you would like it better terse
I’m far too kind to write a villanelle
I need another life time just to mull.
How I can avoid the writers’ curse?
I suspect my sonnets just won’t sell
Is the mind complete, might it be full?
I’d hate to have to write when in my hearse
I’m far too daft to write a villanelle
Get the knitting needles and some wool
I feel as if my brain is going to burst
Writing sonnets when they never sell
Yet writing of all options is least worst
Acting like a midwife or a nurse.
Am I too grey to write a villanelle?
Can I be sure my poetry will not sell?
How my heart sings 