After my husband died I knew I would be paying less Council Tax.When the bank statement came I saw  it was the same as before.When I phoned the Council about a month after my husband had died, the man said,For all we know you have got another man now.I wonder  that they  could speak to me like that.
E-on want to read my metre so I sent them a note did they mean meter.No reply
I am reading the 6 Lives of Henry the Eighth.So far  there’s only been one.Will he rise fron the dead and stop Brexit? That would be fun
I can’t understand a war about roses.I thought gardening was good for us,Will we have a war of the tomatoes?
Richard 3rd is still famous  long after he died.What do I have to do?
I see we accepted the Normans because they were fierce conquerers. So should refugees start a war?
The war against benefits  has been going on and on.Why don’t they just shoot  us all?
It’s too late for breakfast and too late for lunch.I’ll go back to bed and try again tomorrow.If you start on the wrong foot it’s difficult to get it right,or  left

To live without experiencing some shame and blushes of admiration would surely be a wretched life.

I was 16 when we began to study a simplified version of the writings of Thomas Aquinas.I believe now it was a very badly written book as I could see flaws in the arguments.But the most striking effect on me was that I had never questioned the existence of God.
When I began to study the book I thought:So they are not sure!
I think the nuns would have been horrified if I had said that.We were also told that we must not apply to University to do philosophy as they would not allow it.Because it might makes us lose our Faith

So I learned God might not exist and  that people  like myself might lose their Faith.That book we had we read over and over for 2 years.Eventually I lost the type of Faith they had tried to defend but I did not entirely lose the notion of spiritual  or religious experience being possible.And also I am sure there is a God of some sort but there are many ways to find him/her/them including becoming an atheist after going to a school like mine which would open one to other possibilities.

The Art and Science of Doing Nothing

Extract

Our contradictory fear of being idle, together with our preference for sloth , may be a vestige from our evolutionary history. For most of our evolution, conserving energy was our number one priority because simply getting enough to eat was a monumental physical challenge. Today, survival does not require much (if any ) physical exertion, so we have invented all kinds of futile busyness. Given the slightest or even a specious reason to do something, people will become busy. People with too much time on their hands tend to become unhappy or bored.

Yet, Smart argues, boredom is the key to self-knowledge.

What comes into your consciousness when you are idle can often be reports from the depths of your unconscious self— and this information may not always be pleasant. Nonetheless, your brain is likely bringing it to your attention for a good reason . Through idleness, great ideas buried in your unconsciousness have the chance to enter your awareness.

This is a very good account with extracts from two novels as well as some graphs.Be not afraid.You can understand most of it without too much effort

The Butterfly Effect: Everything You Need to Know About This Powerful Mental Model

Extract

The Basics

In one of Stephen King’s greatest works, 11/22/63, a young man named Jake discovers a portal in a diner’s pantry which leads back to 1958. After a few visits and some experiments, Jake deduces that altering history is possible. However long he stays in the past, only two minutes go by in the present. He decides to live in the past until 1963 so he can prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, believing that this change will greatly benefit humanity. After years of stalking Lee Harvey Oswald, Jake manages to prevent him from shooting Kennedy.

Upon returning to the present, he expects to find the world improved as a result. Instead, the opposite has happened. Earthquakes occur everywhere, his old home is in ruins, and nuclear war has destroyed much of the world. (As King wrote in an article for Marvel Spotlight, “Not good to fool with Father Time.”) Distraught, Jake returns to 1958 once again and resets history.

In addition to being a masterful work of speculative fiction, 11/22/63 is a classic example of how everything in the world is connected together.

The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon.

Of course, a single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. Small events can, however, serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/29/britain-glorify-violent-past-defensive-empire-drug?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Opinion+UK+connected&utm_term=276475&subid=13614502&CMP=ema_opinionconnectuk

Extract

“It feels like I live in the middle of a culture war. On one side is a kind of state-sponsored amnesia. It’s pervasive. It’s an Oscar-winning movie perpetuating the idea that Winston Churchill stood alone, at the Darkest Hour, as Nazi fascism encroached, with Britain a small and vulnerable nation isolated in the north Atlantic. In reality the United Kingdom was at that moment an imperial power with the collective might of Indian, African, Canadian and Australian manpower, resources and wealth at its disposal.”

I have had my friend Phil here all day so I have postponed writing much as we had a lot to discuss and I also  got him to put my green bin out!?Men are very good with green wheelie bins.And the recycling ones as well.He even makes  a pot of tea or two as he knows where the tea is.What a change in the last 40 years;men were unable to even fill the kettle back then and as for  boiling an egg!Katherine

In England now the seasons seem to dance
To quick music brightness comes and goes
Summer comes about by happenstance

Gales and lightning wound the outstretched branch
Apples cannot ripen when it snows
In England now the seasons seem to dance

Eating  in the garden, storms by chance
Ruin all the party as drink flows
Summer comes about by happenstance.

Summer came too early, out it flounced
As the lightning  in the dark sky  glowed
In England now the seasons seem to dance

The joy inside the heart was  well aroused
The nestling birds were learning how to fly
Summer came and went by happenstance.

True hope comes and settles without lies
Faith is all enduring,never dies
In England now the seasons seem to dance
Summer flaunts  her goods but somewhere else

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/394/contemporary-poetrys-influence-on-cross-cultural-perceptions

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/philosophy-and-the-poetic-imagination/

“Most importantly, the example shows that we cannot draw a sharp boundary to distinguish some language as intrinsically poetic.  We can apply our poetic attention to commonplace language, and thereby give that language unexpected depth and importance.  Indeed, poets such as William Carlos Williams purposefully challenge us to extend our sensibilities and find the poetry in everyday language, whenever they construct poems with familiar vocabulary and cadence.

How do we cultivate the poetic imagination?  We must attune ourselves, however we see fit, to the features we notice in a poem, as a prompt to experience its language more deeply.  This search for significance can target any noticeable feature of the poem—regardless of the meaning, if any, the feature might literally encode. We can listen to the sounds and rhythm of the poem. We can feel its syntax and structure. We can even attend to its visual shape and layout before us, as the poet e. e. cummings often invited his readers to do.

However, even when we explore the familiar domains of sound, meter, rhyme and line, we must be prepared to explore the variable and open-ended significance of each observation.  We saw, for example, the different effects of lineation in the Missed Connections poem.  There is no one meaning or effect for parsing lines; for annotating lines; or in juxtaposing the two. What we find in all these cases is just a formal contrast, an echo of further differences, which we can appreciate more deeply only by probing the poem further. This variability underscores the creativity poets and readers bring to their art.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms

Accentual verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllables—regardless of the total number of syllables—in each line. Many Old English poems, including Beowulf, are accentual; see Ezra Pound’s modern translation of “The Seafarer.” More recently, Richard Wilbur employed this same Anglo-Saxon meter in his poem “Junk.” Traditional nursery rhymes, such as “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,” are often accentual.

Accentual-syllabic verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet. From line to line, the number of stresses (accents) may vary, but the total number of syllables within each line is fixed. The majority of English poems from the Renaissance to the 19th century are written according to this metrical system.

Acmeism

An early 20th-century Russian school of poetry that rejected the vagueness and emotionality of Symbolism in favor of Imagist clarity and texture. Its proponents included Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova.

Acrostic

A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. See Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky.”

Alcaic

A four-line stanza invented by the Classical Greek poet Alcaeus that employs a specific syllabic count per line and a predominantly dactylic meter. Alfred, Lord Tennyson imitated its form in his poem “Milton.”

France grants honorary citizenship to hero ‘spiderman’ migrant who saved toddler-(video)

Extract

With a crowd below cheering him on from the street, the migrant  pulled himself from balcony to balcony at risk of life and limb, and managed to grab the four-year-old as a neighbour unsuccessfully tried to reach the boy from the nearest flat.

President Emmanuel Macron invited Mr Gassama to the Elysee Palace on Monday morning to personally thank him. During their filmed conversation, Mr Gassama said that he was trembling like a leaf after his courageous act.

Afterwards, Mr Macron announced that he would be granted French citizenship and join the French fire brigade.

Behind the mask our nature lies concealed
But with a mask no human can be healed
When to show and when to hide , who knows?
Secrets,lies,manoeuvres, run  the show
Faust with  the old devil made a deal
While the angels tottered ,unrevealed
And so the pact was made and then was sealed
Behind the mask
Off the face, the make up’s nightly peeled
While we  dream our Plays  from all we feel
Underneath our facade, waters flow
We join the sea of life to undergo
The transformation  by the miller’s wheel
Without the mask

When there is no need to speak or sigh
When the loved one sees with a true eye
Then the art of living is restored
The world is seen anew ,no more abhored
But lovers  each grow old and  one will die
We cannot hide the truth or tell a lie
No more could we grow wings and hope to fly
We’re no angels nor a God adored.
How are we living?
The time moves on and humans can’t delay
Nor is God affected by dismay
Life is truth and humans can’t defraud
We must pay the price we can’t afford
Until we join the stars and need no more
The art of living

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/americas-hidden-role-in-h_b_155087.html?guccounter=1

By Stephen Zunes

http://learn.lexiconic.net/elementsofpoetry.htm

Extract

STRUCTURE and POETRY

An important method of analyzing a poem is to look at the stanza structure or style of a poem. Generally speaking, structure has to do with the overall organization of lines and/or the conventional patterns of sound. Again, many modern poems may not have any identifiable structure (i.e. they are free verse), so don’t panic if you can’t find it!

STANZAS: Stanzas are a series of lines grouped together and separated by an empty line from other stanzas. They are the equivalent of a paragraph in an essay. One way to identify a stanza is to count the number of lines. Thus:

• couplet (2 lines)
• tercet (3 lines)
• quatrain (4 lines)
• cinquain (5 lines)
• sestet (6 lines) (sometimes it’s called a sexain)
• septet (7 lines)
• octave (8 lines)
  

FORM: A poem may or may not have a specific number of lines, rhyme scheme and/or metrical pattern, but it can still be labeled according to its form or style. Here are the three most common types of poems according to form:

1. Lyric Poetry: It is any poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses strong thoughts and feelings. Most poems, especially modern ones, are lyric poems. 

2. Narrative Poem: It is a poem that tells a story; its structure resembles the plot line of a story [i.e. the introduction of conflict and characters, rising action, climax and the denouement].

3. Descriptive Poem: It is a poem that describes the world that surrounds the speaker. It uses elaborate imagery and adjectives. While emotional, it is more “outward-focused” than lyric poetry, which is more personal and introspective.

The still, small voice no longer can be heard.
The  sacred, silent space  unoccupied
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

We centre our   whole self on the absurd
For iPads cannot pass through any eye
The still, small voice no longer can be heard.

God no longer feels inclined to share.
The golden cloud  of angels  cannot fly
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

The altar’s stripped,  the rituals are nightmares.
The ancient priest says Mass and wonders why
The still, small voice no longer can be heard.

A  virtual wall stops grace from being shared.
Jesus is made flesh and  silent dies
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

No one is an island, John Donne cried
But now there is no truth to satisfy
The still ,small voice no longer can be heard.
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word

At Whitsuntide we celebrate
The Holy Dove who  will remake
The life within the human soul
With intent to make us whole
For our life is no mistake
We’re here to live, be not afraid
For  virtue is why we  are made
But also laughter, be not staid
At Whitsuntide
Some  are  silent ,some create
Some are  cruel and devastate
We tell stories new and old
The dove brings peace  which us enfolds
At Whitsuntide

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146671/headless-hearts

Beginning of the article

I miss you eating with me,my dear one
You always smiled when reading in your chair
I miss the conversation now you’re gone

I wish some days that  my own life had run
But  I must live and  this  strange  heart I bear
I miss you eating with me,my dear one

I’m happy then I’m sad and that’s no fun
My temper loosens yet I do not swear
I miss the conversation now you’re gone

I wonder when my own last day will come
I hope I shall be conscious of who’s near
I miss you eating with me,my dear one

Does no-one love me  now my looks don’t stun?
I  fear not God, to disgrace I’m inured
I miss the  loving journey we began

The Sacred Heart of Love we  must revere
Be grateful for the moments, shed our tears
I miss you eating with me,my dear one
I miss those conversations now you’re gone

via James Pennebaker’s Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions