My patient announced she had good news … and bad. “The medicine for my earache worked,” she said. “What’s the bad news?” I asked.

“It tasted awful.”

Since she was feeling better, I didn’t have the heart to tell her they’re called eardrops for a reason. —Murray Grossan, MD, founder of 
the Grossan Institute, Los Angeles

Find out what else you doctor’s really thinking but won’t say to your face.

What is that character on the blackboard?

t’s the headmaster trodden to   death
No, it’s a number.
I think it’s a Greek letter
It’s just in your imagination
I can’t see anything at all.
What blackboard?
What is a blackboard?
How out of date
Throw it away.
Him not it
What a character he was.
Metaphorically speaking

The child too shy to join  a little group
Or shamed by her old clothing  and her shoes
The one who feels they don’t fit in or match
The one who suffered early from the blues

The barren wife, no virgin yet unused
The girl so clever yet she was well bruised
The middle age of suffering ends and views
The loneliness  of age  with none amused

The man too nervous to make any move
The man who cannot pass  yet cannot love
The aging figure hopelessly bemused
The sperm still leaping,never to be used.

Some are in and others are outside
How few stayed with Jesus as he cried!
If we were more like him we would now mix
With the people who fall through the cracks.

A hint of suffering in the edge of eye
A hint of sadness by  the mouth denied
A hint of being tired of one’s own life
A hint that maybe someone wants to die

https://www.etymonline.com/word/

“The meaning of Greek kharakter was extended in Hellenistic times by metaphor to “a defining quality, individual feature.” In English, the meaning “sum of qualities that define a person or thing and distinguish it from another” is from 1640s. That of “moral qualities assigned to a person by repute” is from 1712.”

I  am a mystery mostly to myself
Others see my acts  better than I can
And they see my face with its expressions
Again I see just the reflection in their face
So maybe we could ask, yet I feel afraid
As if I might see the head of the Gorgon
Or you might see me like that
You might say wounding words
Why do I fear that?
Mostly  people don’t look at us so much as we fear and hope

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/character

At first it seemed like summer once again
When cats curled up on cushions drowse  and dream
Yet second seeing finds the sun  estranged
Makes autumn bring out ancient  colouring schemes

The world, intense,  is full of new born dawns
At first it seems like summer still remains
We love the greeny grass of ancient lawns
Yet second seeing  learns the sun’s disdain

 
While cats curled up on cushions drowse  and dream
While little children play with whip and ball
Then autumn brings out ancient  coloured schemes
As we begin to view the  full filled Fall

So  older people’s minds  weave new  and lost
And cats curled up on cushions drowse  and dream
We  notice how the sun  has burned the grass
While autumn paints its ancient  coloured themes

Round the wheel turns at a steady pace
Yet it seemed like summer  had remained
Nature does not enter any race
Yet second seeing finds the sun estranged

In my end is  origin and growth
For the racing hare and weary sloth

If God knows everything, why should we tell our sins to a priest?
God must be stupid if he spends all day watching me or you or anyone.I mean he watched Hitler and what good did that do?
God must be cruel otherwise he would never have created human beings who kill animals,birds.trees and each other.I mean,why?
If God know everything, we might be just a tiny part of that.We are like flies buzzing round his kitchen.One day he will buy some flyspray.
Well, not buy it!

http://www.warscapes.com/poetry/poem-history

“Brenda Marie Osbey’s long poem, “History,” from which we have published an excerpt here, comes from her recent collection History and Other Poems (Time Being Books 2012). The subject of these poems is colonialism, the slave trade, but also, the telling of history itself. We have asked Brenda Marie Osbey to discuss the relation of  poetry to  history, and to discuss the relation of history to the literary symbol, and we have transcribed this discussion below:

Noam Scheindlin: Your poems engage with a long tradition of the poet as historian.  Your poems also seem to manifest something of the impersonal thrust of history: the disembodied voices, snatches of songs, unattributed quotations could be understood to perform the way history creates subjects.  But there is of more than this: there is a counter-thrust; an opposition not just to the way things happened—but to the way-things-are-told.  How do you understand the function / phenomenon of poetry in relation to that of “history?” Can a poem be history?

Brenda Marie Osbey: There is a longer tradition of the poet-as-historian than we readily admit. Isn’t history always the way/s in which things are told, who does the telling and on what authority? Antar ibn Shaddad, the Black Raven of Saudi Arabia, wrote that three things define man: “to make love, to make war, to make verse.” Long before his 6th century epic of war and love, the Gabon Death Rite Suites and hunting poems were composed, and the Khoikhoi lyric poems on the nature of the universe, all of which tell such a great deal about ancient sub-Saharan African social and political life, religion, mythology and warfare. The teachings of Lao-Tsu come to us in verse. Much of the accepted history of Western antiquity comes to us from Homer. And, of course, the Nahuatl philosopher-poet-king and master craftsman Nezahualcoyotl recorded in poems and songs much of what we’ve come to understand about life in the pre-Columbian Americas. Indeed, much if not most of what we know (or claim to know) about the ancient worlds of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, we know through poetry anyway. What ancient societies can we claim to know that didn’t have generations of peripatetic bards carrying news and history in some combination of song, lyric and narrative poem? More recently, so much of what we’ve come to understand about the experience of the Middle Passage we know from Robert Hayden’s brilliant narrative poem of that title. In the words of the late Audre Lorde, poetry is not a luxury. Literary critic Deborah McDowell writes passionately about “the myths, the fables, the abridgements, the approximations, and the outright lies that masquerade” in the name of history. This presumed divide between history and poetry really is a relatively recent one, and one that seems to underscore the recent need to segregate intellectual and creative work into neat and exclusive categories. Hence, the notion of history as the serious business of historians and, more and more, of journalists, and of poetry as an art form concerned primarily with personal identity and craft, precious, interesting perhaps, but signifying nothing. My own practice has always been to think of poetry first, foremost and always as a way of engaging and interacting in and with the world.”