Water that the sun burned up too well

It seemed the fires of Grenfell Tower had spread
A hear oppressive like the fires of hell
London smothered in air dull and dead.

Flames that slobbered with a passion red
Water that the sun burned up too well
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread

God permitted Satan with his dread
Britain quarrelled, split , prepared to kill.
London smothered in air dull and dead.

A referendum showed us all ill-bred.
Neighbours spoke in words that I call vile.
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread

By what person is our nation led
who fills our stomach with acidic bile?
The PM spoke in words both dull and dead.

Tempers raged like fires all fresh and wild
Evil was to emptiness beguiled
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread
People smothered in the fire lie dead

In looking at this I realized that the handwritten poem with its alterations is interesting but also if you look at it from a slight distance the poem itself becomes like a drawing where there is a certain beauty in the arrangement of the lines and the words

To me,at one point, it looked like a music score.

The script is like music score

Through which we pass as through a door

Imagination’s home

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/destiny

Allocking means killing time

.Agate means at wotk in Bolton dialect

That’s killing time

Am allocking agen today
That’s killin’ time, as now we say
Ah,shud be agate but oh ah can’t
Work ‘as gotten ‘ard teh find

Ma mammy’s ill and she’ll soon die
I must wear a suit and tie
Allocking meks me feel ill
Did mother make a legal will?

Am all allooan up on’t Pike
Rivington is weear folk hike
Am all allooan and ah feel low
Allocking is touch ‘n go

Where’s mi daddy an’ ‘is pipe
Where’s dad’s jacket,full ah smoke?
I want him back ,mi mam’s alloooan
You ‘ed wonder at ‘er groans

Where’s mi cat and where’s mi dog
Where’s ower’ handmade fireside rug?
Made ‘eh rags and hooked through cloth
Eeh, won’t God be filled with wrath?

God is never all allooan
Never allocks, he’s a stone
Amno bettin’ ‘eaven exists
That’s why all wa men get pissed

But ah’ve seen Hell ,oh Ama sure?
Nothin’ yooman shall endure.

By the lily pond 2012

Shimmering light
The lily pond
The music of your eye
The touch of your arm
Your always honey smell.
I love.
Rustling trees in a row,
A wide green lawn;
People stoop to see small flowers.
A snail on the path.
The perfecton of the shell.
I believe
Unusually tall dandelions
at the edge of this wood
Wave in the warm west wind.
We smile.
Sitting pen in hand
I wonder what I would have written
In all the letters I’ve not sent you.
Far away on the Ridgeway,
Cars,seem small as ants,
Rush towards the motorway.
They make us laugh.
How green the meadows are
How fresh the old trees.
I gaze at you.
I find I am.
It’s mutual.
I thank you

,Masud Khan thought

.human beings had “from time immemorial” needed an “other” to relate to in order to have stability and to learn about the self and, in prior eras, people used God as the “other” with whom they could relate.3 But as religion became less personal, the relationship to God was replaced by friendship with mortals, and mortals served the purpose as well as God had: “To sense oneself alive in another’s preoccupations is to be in a state of grace.”4 Love relations were important, he said, but friendship lasted longer.

From the book

False self

by Linda Hopkins

The path on Arnside Knott came to the shore
Where sea and river meet at my heart’s core
Where wild flowers grow, where butterflies float on.
The views of Lakeland Hills ,so ravishing

My heart was only half alive till then
The land surpassed imagination
I was used to mills and dirty air
Despite the heather moors and hilltops bare

Later death came near on Langdale Pike
My fingertips were hurting,feet agape
Then my toe was back on a foothold
The shadow of the mountain huge and cold

Beauty,love and death, the opera calls
Singing as we walk the danger walls

https://www.emmahigginbotham.com/recent-interviews/alexander-mccall-smith

 I recommend this  interview very strongly.

https://aeon.co/essays/a-rare-interview-with-philip-pullman-the-religious-atheist

 

 

“‘I like to say I’m a complete materialist but…’ Pullman allows himself an English teacher’s dramatic pause, ‘matter is conscious. How do I know that? Because I’m matter and I’m conscious.’ Once again, Pullman opts for complexity and nuance, and you can hear the same dislike of hierarchies in his critique of some popular science. ‘What you often get in people of this stripe (and Brian Cox — the TV physicist — goes in for it as well), is a sentence of the formula “X is no more than/just/merely/nothing but Y.” For example: “The world is nothing but the action of molecules” or “Love is merely the movement of electrons in the brains.” Sentences of that sort are nearly always mistaken,’ says Pullman. ‘I would prefer they were put in the form of “Love is a movement of electrons in the brain, among other things.”’

‘Among other things’ would be a great motto for Pullman’s ambivalence (or should that be multivalence?) about matters of belief, fiction and science. He is of the old school of secularism which holds that faith should be kept out of the public sphere, but still refuses the kind of inquisition that seeks to root out mistaken beliefs: ‘What you feel and believe are private to you and belong to nobody else,’ he counters. ‘What you do in the public sphere is what’s important.’

Yet on one thing, Pullman’s faith is profound and unshakeable. He’s now in his mid-60s, and though he thinks about death occasionally, it never wakes him up in a sweat at night. ‘I’m quite calm about life, about myself, my fate. Because I knew without doubt I’d be successful at what I was doing.’ I double-take at this, a little astounded, but he’s unwavering. ‘I had no doubt at all. I thought to myself, my talent is so great. There’s no choice but to reward it. If you measure your capacities, in a realistic sense, you know what you can do.’”

I do not see my future, how to go
But now I have steam cleaned the kitchen floor
If I run out of all my china plates
I’ll eat meat off the floor till I am late.

I only see a half of what most see.
But still enjoy to swill my throat with tea.
The world is so delightful, I must smile
My grin is wider than the Royal Mile,

We wonder about ethics and virtue
But what matters is our choice and choose we do.
The new doormat’s good, for it is bright
My little bay tree loves the air and light

When the dirt is vanquished for a time
I sit down with a pen and start to write.
Dirt’s a symbol of our human sin
Yet without it, plants have nothing to grow in

So dirt and dust, creative elements
Are only bad when they create a stench
I found some fruit that rotted in its bag
The odour was, in its way, very bad.

At first, I could not locate the odour’s source
I wondered if it came from my parts “coarse”
But no I’ve never smelled as bad
As bananas stuck inside a plastic bag

And do it is when we wear manmade cloth
The heat of polyester brings out wrath
For sweat or moisture can’t evaporate
We swelter like a vine of purple grapes.

She has  an Ulster on tow

So there’s more than one Elstree then?

Does your Android Copperfield?

It was just Barbara King’s ulva.

Where is an ulva  or all of you laugh?

This is not my English sense.

Is it your Irish scent?

Do you mean my accent?

I didn’t know your act had an odour

Is  it the order of sanctity?

I see someone who’s not a bishop has been made a cardinal.

It’s all just Circus location.

I suppose the odour and the accent traveled around with the circus

Well they couldn’t travel by themselves

I have never seen an accent without seeing a person

Because you have heard an accent without hearing the person?

Similarly it’s unusual to impel an odour without seeing somebody.

La casa address

I mean a psychiatrist.

What about a psychoanalist?

You’re fined

What for?

The smell icing.

Well there’s always been a bias against dialect.

That can’t be true because at the beginning the dialect was the language so they couldn’t have been a bias against it

It’s the people who spoke the dial out Lucifer from bias

The people who spoke the dialect who suffer from the bias o or the prejudice

Oldest started because I’ve got an ulcer on my toe and from that much stranginess is flowed I only wish the also would flow or fly

Or else,oh!

https://www.thetimes.com/article/39979ebe-07fb-4ab5-8b0e-81f0685bfc4c?shareToken=c0ead3d35ceb4bf0615f1d0b6b605790

King solver says that

sexist and racist attitudes are now less acceptable. “But classism, we have made no progress. Urban well-to-do people still make jokes about dumb hillbillies … Even the very progressive people still buy into the meritocracy

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Iris Murdoch

I love the little cyclamen

I grow it in my own garden

The waxy flowers make colour glow

They are my prayer, it shall be so.

When I am gone and in the ground

Plant me flowers like these around

But now I live and sing my songs

In the end there’s nothing wrong.

Since the beginning of the human cultures, so far as we know, man has always experienced, known and felt his own being through the other. This other was always non-human: a fetish (as in the primitive African cultures); an idol (Buddha is the supreme example); anthropomorphic supra-human presences (the gods of the Greeks abundantly testify to that) or God, that unique invention of the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Sometime in the sixteenth century all this began to change (cf. Gay 1966). The most revolutionary characteristic of Modernism is the European man’s decision to be his own sole witness and exclude God, more and more, from his private relation to himself

Masud Khan

Hidden selves.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/04/11/masud-khan-lying-fallow/

. The individual on whom leisure has been imposed in massive doses, and who has little capacity to deal with it, then searches for distractions that will fill this vacuum… A great deal of the distress and psychic conflict that we see clinically… is the result of a warped and erroneous expectancy of human nature and existence. It is the omnipresent fallacy of our age that all life should be fun and that all time should be made available to enjoy this fun. The result is apathy, discontent and pseudo-neurosis.

I have just read in the newspaper that’s a woman died after opening up her ottoman. She went over to put something into the base and unfortunately the bear in the mattress descended and caught her by the neck and she suffocated

It was a gas operated bed and one of the gas cylinders was faulty

I would think mechanical lift will be better

Or just have an ordinary bed with a drawer in it

I wandered lonely as a clown

That wakes one day in A and E.

An all at once she  hears a crowd

Shout: it’s gone private, there’s a fee.

I have insurance the clown lied.

She cracks her knuckles as she cries.

Should they let her go inside?

Which is bigger e or pi?

So in the nightmare

I then died.

My husband’s angry at my lot.

But when I woke he ran away

Do I care? Oh not a jot

Is this lyric is it to text?

Shall I sing or speak the rest?

On the subject my mind’s vexed

I’d really love to fail the test

If you’re a genius, go to bed

Never mind what daddy said.

I think I’ll leave the rest as read

I’m going home to swing the lead.

I’m filled with dread

I don’t care what no one said.

Without a frame the portraits dead

The poet writes in sile a shed.

I hope your heart is not too sad.

Every feeling seems quite bad

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/the-big-idea-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

We’re not afraid just of bad things in our lives like losing people or treasures or jobs.

No we are not just afraid of the bad things but we’re also afraid of being overwhelmed by joy by beauty by love

We think we want love or to be knocked out with joy

But often the only way this can happen is when we are not expecting it

Is this why dating websites don’t work very well?

I’ve been overwhelmed several times by the stunning beauty of buildings like St Paul’s Cathedral.

That happened as I was in a car in the city but I’d lost track of where exactly we were and so I was not expecting to see a floodlit building when I did

It was a marvelous experience but I wonder how often I have blocked things off because either I think I know what it is I’ve already seen that I don’t need to look at it again

Oh because in some way it’s fearful as well. I think Westminster Abbey is fearful inside because it’s so massive.

Could it be the same as people?

We do and we do not wish to be overwhelmed by people.

Also is it just the English who don’t like to talk about such emotions?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s modern life we don’t have time to be knocked out by something beautiful and  be  lying on the ground looking up at the cathedral, when we should be at a meeting or during the supermarket shopping etc

York is said to be the most beautiful city in Europe or one of the most beautiful but I know someone who lives there and she said to me one day

Oh, do you get used to it you don’t really notice it.

How can we stop getting like that so that we can see at least some things a fresh with new eyes?

Until it’s happened to you, you don’t know that it’s possible.

It could happen in a bad way as Hitler was said to have hypnotic power. I don’t have enough evidence of this but it would make things more easy to understand if you’ve been overwhelmed by the evil in somebody else it might kill you or it might make you worship them.

That’s the trouble with political parties.

They themselves or others want to know absolutely everything clearly what are they going to do what are they not going to do but surely they will have to see this country with New eyes hopefully a labour government is more likely to have sympathy for the poor. But they’re clone there’s no point having sympathy unless you’ve got the power to do something to make the Econony stronger, to make it grow.

Maybe we don’t want to think certain thoughts. We don’t want to think that there’s no magic one that can be waved after 14 years of austerity and civil conflict

It’s good to be able to be shocked by what you perceive.

It’s not good to be cynical. Because they’re new do not actually want to know or to see how things could be different because we claim nothing is any good anyway

No,despair,I shall not let you win
I’l fight you with my being and disdain
No,despair, you are a deadly sin
I’ll drive you out by writing with my pen

Oh,despair, be not my constant friend.
I look for one much brighter and less fey.
To you no card or present will I send
You must not steal my company today.

Oh, fond despair,I cannot hide from you
I fly into your blackness like a bird
Yet now it is a golden light I see,
Consoling and so warm it clothes my words

Despair,my friend, I’ll fear no more your deeps.
You open up a door while I still weep

2018

Could it be despair that held me tight

in that February evening and the night

I could not see a way to carry on

Everything seemed dark and I was done

I saw great blackness all around myself

I could not be restored, I had no health

I had reached the end of seeking aid

God alone knew all the coins were paid

Oh gracious mysterious glowing light

That made a warm shawl round me on that night

Impressing me with kindness and goodwill

Holding me until I’d had my fill

Most sensuous, most tangled with love’s grace

Surrounding me, protecting my lost face

As if the arms of love were something real

That anyone who knew this must reveal

Only if we reach that darkest point

May the force of Love with light annoint

I was glad to hear your voice this afternoon

Minor strokes cause worry, if not doom

We all have blood to thick to pass with ease

Tell the doctor they will be quite pleased

They like to prescribe drugs to our old folk

They often try to mend us when we’re broke

And though their drugs may kill they take no blame

They feel so little guilt so little shame.

They gave me aspirin every single day

The dentist was so worried that she prayed

Luckily she quelled the blood that leaked

I was so surprised I could not speak.

Remember good intentions can go wrong.

Winter may develop amid Spring

Do not help another till you’re sure.

What you give  won’t harm them but will cure

If  you are in doubt you should do naught

Life can be destroyed but can’t be bought

Old judgements and past memories dull the sight

How can we restore our lost delight?

Expectation is a block unseen

Find the eyes of mirth,and see between

In between the rainbow and the rain

This precious moment will not come again.

Throw off your cares, become a beggar poor.

What is most important will endure.

https://bigthink.com/influence-power-politics/disagreeing-without-being-disagreeable/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton

Furthermore, Milton may have begun to compose one or more of his mature works—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—in the 1640s, but they were completed and revised much later and not published until after the Restoration.

This literary genius whose fame and influence are second to none, and on whose life and works more commentary is written than on any author except Shakespeare, was born at 6:30 in the morning on 9 December 1608. His parents were John Milton , Sr., and Sara Jeffrey Milton , and the place of birth was the family home, marked with the sign of the spread eagle, on Bread Street, London. Three days later, at the parish church of All Hallows, also on Bread Street, he was baptized into the Protestant faith of the Church of England. Other children of John and Sara who survived infancy included Anne, their oldest child, and Christopher, seven years younger than John. At least three others died shortly after birth, in infancy or in early childhood. Edward Phillips, Anne’s son by her first husband, was tutored by Milton and later wrote a biography of his renowned uncle, which was published in Milton’s Letters of State (1694). Christopher, in contrast to his older brother on all counts, became a Roman Catholic, a Royalist, and a lawyer.

Milton’s father was born in 1562 in Oxfordshire; his father, Richard, was a Catholic who decried the Reformation. When John Milton, Sr., expressed sympathy for what his father viewed as Protestant heresy, their disagreements resulted in the son’s disinheritance. He left home and traveled to London, where he became a scrivener and a professional composer responsible for more than twenty musical pieces. As a scrivener he performed services comparable to a present-day attorney’s assistant, law stationer, and notary. Among the documents that a scrivener executed were wills, leases, deeds, and marriage agreements. Through such endeavors and by his practice of money lending, the elder Milton accumulated a handsome estate, which enabled him to provide a splendid formal education for his son John and to maintain him during several years of private study. In “Ad Patrem” (To His Father), a Latin poem composed probably in 1637-1638, Milton celebrated his “revered father.” He compares his father’s talent at musical composition, harmonizing sounds to numbers and modulating the voices of singers, to his own dedication to the muses and to his developing artistry as a poet. The father’s “generosities” and “kindnesses” enabled the young man to study Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, and Italian.”

Little is known of Sara Jeffrey, but in Pro Propulo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (The Second Defense of the People of England, 1654) Milton refers to the “esteem” in which his mother was held and to her reputation for almsgiving

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/19/winnicott-care-cure/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats

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John Keats

1795—1821SharePortrait of John Keats by William Hilton.

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.

Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative handful of poems