I’ m  from Croatia, how about you?
I talk with my crutches  that I bought in the zoo
The eagles were flying as if they might pray
I talked to God but he said  he can’t say
I  do like  this England , I grew up in Madrid
I should have been sad for my mother was dead
Croatia is stunning,I’ve seem my old man
He said he was seasick, before Labour began
I can’t vote in Elections, nor receive ready meals
My skin is still white but they say I will peel
Croatia’s my dream place, the mountains are steep
The sea it is blue as we know by the bleeps
I wish I was English, but it’s no use to  dream
I ‘m psychopathic   and abnormally clean
I’ve got attachment disorder, am I mentally ill?
I was nearly newborn when my mum  took  the pill
Humanae Vita, no  abortions allowed
No contraception as we’re all well endowed
The Pope gave his answers, we all disobeyed
Otherwise virtue is nobody’s game

The cherry tree   looks like a  parasol
I rest beneath  it on a neighbour’s wall
I  shall not tell of  hate  or love painful
The cherry tree   looks like   parasol
Mental pain needs more than Panadol
Today a hot blue sky is just symbol
Here no vultures fly nor magpies call
The cherry tree   looks like a  parasol
I sit beneath  it on a neighbour’s wall

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126282089&t=1558608220178

Extract:

Early in the collection, Young includes a poem, “Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden, that was read at his father’s service. It begins:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

It’s that ability — to express a feeling like the one that arrives quickly after the loss of a loved one — that poems like Auden’s wield.

“I think that’s a real part of grief that we sometimes aren’t able to talk about and I think that poetry talks about perhaps better than anything else,” Young tells NPR’s Renee Montange. “It’s able capture a moment, a feeling, perhaps a fleeting feeling, and even make — as that poem does — music out of it.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/the-trauma-of-facing-deportation

Extract:

She believes that people cannot be truly healthy unless they have trygghet, a word that in English translates as “security” but which has a broader meaning in Swedish: trust, a sense of belonging, freedom from danger, anxiety, and fear. The modern Swedish welfare state was built on the idea that it must safeguard trygghet for its citizens, minimizing the risks to which they are exposed. “Security is the most basic foundation of the individual,” the Swedish minister of social affairs explained, in 1967. “Nothing good has ever come out of insecurity.”

I do not need a diamond ring I know
Once the final treasure of a wife
But wish to entertain with  trumpet show

But missing an engagement, I feel low
I’m down and out, I have no proper life
I do not need a diamond ring ,oh,no.

If any man proposed,I’d feel a blow
Here I see   young Hamlet and his knife
I   wish for grandeur from Chanel cologne

My long gone children haunt me as I sew
I mend  the world, I wish to do it thrice
We do not need a diamond -horn to blow

I shall be humbled by the summer snow
The ice upon my cake is thick and white
I   wish for heat , wish for the sun to glow

Shall Jehovah come to earth and smite
Those who hurt by envy and by strife?
I do  not need that ring but love  alone
I wish to entertain  with fun and groans

Eat your dinner from the  open keyboard
Drink beer while typing
For a touchscreen,use a fork to move the cursor
Hit  the keyboard if you are angry
Keep the teapot nearby and hold your cups over the laptop
Watch violent films and spit as far as you can before hitting your head on the screen
Never close the lid and never clean the keyboard
Keep it in the kitchen next to the microwave
Keep it in the fridge with  raw bacon in between the screen and keyboard
Use it as a doorstop
Carry it about with you without a bag or cover
Hit people on the bus with it and refuse to apologise.

The evil  leader  wants to be our god
Controlling thinking, focusing our needs
He rules  us with  the fearsome gun and  rod

Hitler drew the adulation of the crowd
At Nuremberg his ego swelled in greed
The evil tyrant  wants to be a god

With distant face, God heard the violent sound
But from the human world he long has fled
Hitler’s people worshipped what they found

God dwells in his grave now, underground
He sent the Word, but who can hear the Dead?
The evil  man identifies as god

In Church they took Christ’s body in their mouths
Their souls were never present as He bled
Hitler’s human  sacrifices spread

From the Pulpit Jesus’ words were read
As gas destroyed the Jews, where was the threat?
The evil  leader  deigns to be our god
He offers Heaven,  Hell is made instead

1* Writing tablet
1* Stylus

Precautions:
1.Do not violent writing, will damage the screen affect the writing effect.
2.Products avoid water, avoid using sharp objects scratch the screen.
3.Clean with clean cloth when cleaning.
4.When replacing the battery, please use the battery that matches the battery.
5.Age of application: over 3 years of age.

I’m over 3 years old, I must confess
Will violent writing help me to express
The rage of Brexit, Union Jack
The hatred of the Jew and Black
The Muslim woman answering back
The anorexic culture thwack ?
I’m over 3 years old ,  and nappyless
Are we depressed
I think you guessed

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68606/spiritual-poetry

“The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.

But, no, I’ve been asked to choose, to recommend. The poems I suggest here are this moment’s choices, not “the best spiritual poems” (a phrase weighing nothing in so intimate and personal a context). The “gates” are an equally personal selection of entrance points into spiritual life. Some of the poems are well known, others less so. “

By Katherine

Essay: The Feel of Thinking – Sarah Howe on lyric connections and incisions

Extract

What might it mean for a poet to ‘feel’ his or her ‘thought’? Eliot championed the so-called ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century for their efforts ‘to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.’ Such poets are marked out, for Eliot, by their ‘rapid association of thought’, giving rise to a sensibility that can discern connections between such disparate experiences as falling in love, reading Spinoza, the noise of a typewriter and the smell of cooking. Eliot’s penultimate item always reminds me of those lines from Ashbery’s ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’: ‘And before you know / It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters’. It’s just like Ashbery to transform the sound of purposive writerly activity into consciousness’s white noise.

In a fascinating essay on Donne and modern cognitive science, AS Byatt argues that Donne does indeed feel his thought, but what he makes his readers feel is less Eliot’s odour of the rose than ‘the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself’. She wonderfully dubs Donne a ‘glassy’ poet, since glass is something you can look at and through simultaneously (incidentally the very property of glass that makes it such a choice vehicle for metaphysical conceits). Among the moderns, Byatt attributes similar qualities to Wallace Stevens – think only of the perceptual conundrums of ‘The Glass of Water’: ‘In the metaphysical,’ that poem claims, ‘there are these poles’. For her, what the poems of Donne and Stevens offer is not sensations per se but the ‘process of sensing’, not concepts but the ‘idea of the relations of concepts.’

Can true love be gained by deception?
Will rage never change our perceptions?
Be thoughtful and pray
Be aware of today
Then  you may need  no correction

Can true love bring harm  in its wake?
Can lovers live purely in cake?
There are no general laws
But think and give pause
We are what we love and we hate.

Does hatred exist  before love?
The eagle may kill  the  white dove
The  child uncaressed
Will never be blest
Oh,God, send sweet rain from above

• Stan was leaning over, cleaning the  new bath.When the doorbell rang,he rushed downstairs and opened the  double front door.
  “Will you take this parcel in for the lady next door?” The postman asked wearily.
  “Oh,fine Stan stuttered.He was trying to avoid Annie but here she was,coming down the road of superior semi detached houses suitable for ex-headmasters ,small businessmen,econometricians,surgeons,pie salesmen and  theologians.
  She was wearing perfume, and green sandals from TK Maxx,light khaki tencel cropped combat trousers with a purple silky over-blouse, not to mention her matching raspberry  and cream underwear .Round her neck hung a miniature grandfather clock on a solid gold chain,and she had three  imitation gold and silver watches on each  of her three wrists making a total of 333 watches according to Carnap’s theory of logic and Russell’s terrible handwriting. Stanley didn’t know that she had a mobile phone stuffed into her bra—one advantage for the larger sized woman.In fact she had 4 down there in her raspberry coloured glamour bra,as she had a phobia about their batteries running down all at once
  The more she had the lower the probability of her being without a phone whilst out and about the town and countryside.So she reasoned in her womanly  way. Just then one  phone rang.She rummaged around to the consternation  and turmoil-uation of Stanley and the postman.She plucked out a pale blue phone.
  “Hi,it’s Annie” she murmured.
  “Hi Annie it’s Dave the paramedic with  carpentry skills. You’ve not rung 999 lately so we were wondering if all was well!”
  “Oh,I’m terribly sorry.I’ll try to phone later on.Thanks,Petal.That was Dave,our ex-transvestite converted paramedic”,she informed the men.The postman galloped off on his donkey, his bags full of undelivered males.It’s a tough but interesting life in Knittingham. Would you like a male delivery?Contact Parcel Force without delay.
  Annie went into Stan’s house and demanded a cup of coffee.
  “Won’t it make you put weight on” Stan quipped ironically.
  “Do you think I’m too plump?” she responded anxiously..
  “Too plump for what?” he quipped amiably.
  “To attract men,of course!”
  “No,my angel,you are just perfect”he quacked definitively.”Nor are you an angel,strictly speaking,as I have good reason to know.Thank you,my beloved for services rendered so generously and freely.”
  “Oh,my goodness I must get home to render the fat from the beef and to make some gooseberry jam.” Stanley looked uneasy.
  “I wonder why babies are left under gooseberry bushes?
  The thorns are so big it’s quite dangerous getting them out,or so Mary told me when Lyra was born. She was covered in scratches and wouldn’t come near me for months.”
  “Why don’t you come upstairs to look at our new purple bathroom suite.Since the Royal Wedding it’s the in colour.The gold taps were expensive but they do go well.”
  “My God,let me out.” she bawled,”It reminds me of the Vatican and that’s no place for a lady”,
  “Not even a gay lady?” Stan muttered parsimoniously, as he licked her eyelashes gently.
  “Stop that.I’ve got my Yves St Laurent mascara on.”
  “I prefer the taste of the Chanel,”he disclosed privately in an internal  secret memo.[available on 50 years]
  “Why not lick my neck instead?” she enquired curiously as she tripped over Emile the cat, who had slipped into the bathroom as usual  to see what they were up to,you know what I mean, you catch my drift?
  She fell floppily into the bath and banged her head on the taps.
  “Oh,gosh,better ring 999” Stan said to Emile.
  “Have you got your catphone warehouse mobile on you?”
  “Yes ,it’s in my y-fronts”, the cat amiably miaowed.
  “Hi Dave,this is Emile.Can you come quick.Annie is unconscious and what is worse,she has scratched the new bath.”
  In fact it was Emile who had scratched the bath that morning but since Stan had not noticed he hoped to, callously, pass the blame onto poor  Annie.How cruel can a cat be?  Ask any mouse! Still in the end God made all of us and what a  terrifying and beautiful world it is.