Day: February 25, 2020

Take your love and in your arms enfold.

Did anyone believe blind rage expressed
Could benefit the agent without harm?
Did anyone read Freud and then digest?

Feelings need the heat of blacksmith’s fires
Held inside until they find their form
An image worthy of our right desire

As well as rage, we should mistrust love too
Be backward in expression till more’s known
Or risk an avalanche of cruelty.

Take care of others, they are not our fools
From sacred meetings all mankind has grown
We misuse folk to test our worth and tools

Holding in the inner fires our wish
The blackness of the heart can turn to gold
No contradiction hides such sacredness

Take your love and in your arms enfold.
The future of the world is growing cold
We liked to have the choice for rage and death
Until we found the charred remains of bliss

The hidden workings

mountains nature arrow guide

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/29/nick-laird-poetry-religion

EXTRACT:

 

Though an atheist – in that I believe we’re here only by happy accident – my sensibility is religious. I like ritual and heightened states. I like mind-altering drugs. I believe in invisible forces – radioactivity, magnetism, sound waves – and I’m more than willing to sit for an hour listening to a church organist practice, which I did just last week. And I’ll let myself shiver along with the immense chord changes. I don’t like faith but I’m fond of its trappings- the kitschy icons, the candles, the paintings, the architecture and, especially, the poetry. Though many great religious figures, from Augustine to Screwtape, have taken prose as their instrument for confessing or cajoling, when it comes to praise, poetry’s the usual choice. I’ve been reading Robert Alter’s magnificent new translations of The Book of Psalms, and “My heart is astir with a goodly word”.

The relationship between poetry, those goodly words, and religion is hard to quantify. Both involve the hidden, working at the borders of the sayable. They share an experiential dimension. Personal religion involves a private speech act (prayer), chanting (psalms), heightened states achieved by ritualised words. The Lord’s prayer is one of the first poems I learned. Leached of its import by years of mindless recital, it’s almost a Sitwellian sound poem to me.

 

On a poem by Sylvia Plath about her baby son

Posted on July 28, 2017by 

Bucknell_Valesina-uns

Photo by Mike Flemming 2017 copyright

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/143643/sylvia-plath-nick-and-the-candlestick

 

“In “Nick and the Candlestick,” a woman walks through a dark house toward her sleeping infant, and this ordinary action becomes fused with a metaphoric descent into a ghostly otherworld. Addressed to Plath’s son, Nicholas, the poem belongs to the tradition of poems such as Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Yeats’s “A Prayer for my Daughter” that directly address a poet’s sleeping infant. “Nick and the Candlestick,” however, teems with evocations of the speaker’s pregnancy and continually merges these images with descriptions of the baby himself. Like the poem’s opening fusion of metaphor and reality, this conflation collapses the boundaries between two things: past and present, memory and experience. In the poem, pregnancy is, itself, a time when two individuals are contained in one strangely altered body. As such, pregnancy, like metaphor itself, becomes emblematic of both the tenuousness of distinctions and of the inevitability of transformation.

As in many her poems, Plath borrows language and imagery from nursery rhymes, harnessing their peculiar mixture of menace and cheerful, linguistic playfulness—a juxtaposition that mirrors the poem’s insistence that seemingly disparate emotions or states of being are often closely entwined. This poem’s title recalls an old rhyme:

Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.

If Jack is not nimble, after all, he risks setting himself on fire

Where are men when I need buttered bread?

I broke three back teeth while in my bed
I  prefer to love  but where’s my choice?
What nonsense am I chewing in my head?

I  once had a husband,but he’s dead
Now and then I seem to hear his voice
I broke three back teeth while in my bed

Where are men when I need  buttered bread?
Can I have one  here, I would rejoice?
What nonsense am I stewing in my head?

I used to keep my husband so well fed
I thought he’d never go ,I am annoyed
I broke three back teeth while in my bed

I guess he’s chosen Raphael instead
So I am free to  go out with a buoy
What rubbish am I brewing in my head?

  1. If I am your mistress,  am I coy?
    Andrew Marvell, whom did he employ?
    I broke three back teeth while in my bed
    What substance am I grinding in my head?

When you’re lonely

img_20200128_105515Mary was feeling lonely on Sunday so she decided to go to the Urgent Care Centre in a cab.There were not  many people there but enough to give her  2 hours  in the Waiting Room.Having signed in ,by claiming to have a  UTI, she took off her red coat  bought  in 1992 in  a Sale, and opened her phone.What to read?

Hitler’s Downfall
Quick Cakes
A few novels by Margaret Drabble
Freud the Fraud
Sex  crimes in  therapy
The rise of Fascism in Europe
How to care for a husband
The Second Sex
Feminism and Sexual Orders
How to enjoy your body before it is too late
Differential operators and their followers

After 2 hours Mary went to the Unisex toilets.While inside she hear her name called
I’m in here, she shouted.
Take your time
She handed the kind doctor her sample which was very pale
He went out and came in again
You have a nasty infection, he said calmly
What shall I do?
We have some antibiotics here on Sundays.The pharmacy is shut
Thank goodness
He went to see what he could find and  handed her a box of pills
It wa nice to meet you doctor, thank you.No wonder I felt odd
Yes, it makes you feel confused and  less smart
Indeed.I  meant to  go to Church but came here by accident
How lucky
Mary went outside and  ordered a cab
Well, that was a blessing, she told herself until she saw Annie dressed in purple velvet running down the corridor followed by Emile on a bicycle
Well, that’s what I saw before I took those pills

No words

If we had no language,we’d be good
No communication but by sense
What devil conjured up the  demon word 
Made our dealings complex and intense?

No Tower of Babel, nothing but mud huts
Caressing,kissing,kicking,  real contact
Boxing,wrestling,killing the unjust
No law except the fist. no guilt.no wrack

No religion but  a sense of awe
The rising sun, the moon, the distant stars
Oh,bow before the Cedar and the Oak
Anything that is taller than we are

No  books, no news no media,no war
It makes me wonder what live words are for