After Edna had gone home,her neighbours Mary and Annie had to vacuum the carpet where Edna had knocked over a box of biscuits of a crumbly nature and then trodden on them
Edna is hard to relate to,said Annie warmly
I wonder if she will get easier as time goes on?
You mean you are going to ask her again?
I’ve not decided,Mary told her.It is a lot of effort in winter.
Suppose she asks us over to her place,Annie wondered
We’ll have to see how we feel.I suppose it would be interesting to look at her furniture and see if she has lots of books,Mary said
If we go and borrow a book, don’t pencil in your comments down the side of the page
As if I would! Mary said indignantly.I only do that to my own
Just sayin’ ,Annie replied
Did you like her purple coat?
I think it doesn’t go with red hair but who cares? I’d wear yellow even if I looked sick
That seem stupid,Mary cried anxiously
In the dark of winter it means drivers can see you.
I suppose so.. yes, quite a wise idea.But one rarely sees a yellow coat in a shop.
I think you can get them in shops that sell sailing gear,Annie mumbled
Since we are right in the middle of England, there are none here.We’ll have to go to
Orford,Mary warned her
Where’s that,Annie asked?
Not far from Aldeburgh,Mary said knowingly
It’s too far to go in a day in winter,Annie decided
How many miles is it?
About 159.468 each way
That is 319.435 miles altogether
So if we go at 60 mph it takes 5.3333 hours
And at 50 mph it takes 6.4 hours
40 mph would be 8 hours
10 mph would take 32 hours
2 mph would be 160 hours

Stop, stop!

at 0.5 mph I tbink it’s 640 hours

Well that is that.We can’t go it would be nearly 24 days nonstop or 48 if we stopped for sleep daily

Just get a black coat and wear a yellow hat

We must face up to things or lose our heads

Why  have eyes and act as if we are blind

That is what I thought the parson said

When I heard my body turned to lead

An accidental change made by design

We must face up to things or lose our heads

Without a head where would we put our minds?

That is what I thought the parson said

I lost my glasses lying on your bed

Were they stolen by a man malign?

We must face up to things or lose our heads

I saw God in the hallway looking red

He lost his son and so  cut short his reign

Love is what I thought the parson said.

There is no part of life without its pain

I often. wonder why god gave us brains

We must face up to things while we have heads

Love is always better live or dead

Snow clouds hang like canopies forlorn,
Tinged with grey from lack of proper care,
While from the Channel sing the dread foghorns

Sailors in the night long for new dawn
Fear boats of refugees may still sail there
Snow clouds hang like canopies well torn

A dinghy holds the Saviour lately born
There is no space on earth safe from great fear
From the Channel sigh the families drowned

From maternal space, Jesu is torn
His father holds his arms around those dear
Snow clouds hang, are lacy wings no more

The hearts of British ” natives” have turned sour
Into Jesu’s side we thrust our spears
Tune the channel.Requiems need scores

All lives now, and all of time is here
Do not mistake the song of silent choirs.
Snow clouds hang like canopies forlorn,
While in the Channel, stuttering are the horn

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n23/tom-paulin/entrepreneurship

“Hughes’s prose in his letters is always urgent and compulsive, but there are moments of tender observation, as in a letter to Edna Wholey in 1950, where he says he

heard a commotion in the hedge, and after a while, out trundled a hedgehog, merry as you like, and obviously out for a good time. I thought he might make a jolly companion for an evening so I brought him in. After a while I noticed he had disappeared and later heard a noise just like the sobbing of a little child, but very faint, and it continued for long enough. I traced it to a pile of boxes, and there was my comrade, with his nose pressed in a pool of tears, and his face all wet, and snivelling and snuffling his heart out. I could have kissed him for compassion. I don’t know why I’m so sympathetic towards hedgehogs.

Such moments are like dummy runs for poems, and they remind us of the animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.

Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s early undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1952, when, writing to his sister, Olwyn, he says that sometimes he thinks Cambridge is ‘wonderful’, at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent for ‘clarity simplicity and power’ (note the lack of commas as in ‘mud water fire and air’). Swift’s writing is ‘the bedrock from which every writer must start’.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-britons-poetry-writeapoemaboutbrexit_n_576f87dae4b0dbb1bbbad011

The bus was cancelled so we had to walk
They blamed Eastern Europe   for the pain
I listened to the idle,foolish thought
I fear  it’s Jesus crucified  again.

Is that leap unjustified, my friends?
It seems God’s punishment will never end
He made us  leave the Garden of Delight
Even though we’re English and quite white
We blamed the blacks and women  and the Jews
Yet mother’s breast was emptied and abject
Look upon the world we may have wrecked
Get to work and sweat and toil  all day
Mathematics, war and bombs  shall prey
To gain salvation we must  love and work
Life is hard and often it will hurt
Acceptance is  survival   and remorse
Jesus came  without the use of force