http://classicalpoets.org/how-to-write-a-sestina-with-examples/

Pray, Father,I give you my blessing
That’s the wrong way round.Never mind.Tell me your original sins.
We don’t have to confess those surely.We are born like that.
I mean I am fed up with boring sins like theft and swearing.
I don’t know if I can think if any sin except I bought my husband some soap called Allure.If it does allure he might be unfaithful and it will be my fault.
Don’t worry about the future.At least he will smell nice in bed.You should get Chanel Number 5
It might confuse the cat in bed.
Why, do you make love to the cat?
No, but the cat sits on top when we do it.
So what’s the problem?
If the cat hates Chanel Number 5 he might leave the room and love without the cat is  not what we are used to
But it’s not a sin!
Oh dear.I can’t think of anything else.
You must try harder
Do you mean to remember sins or to commit more?
Whatever, it gets really boring in here.
Would Jesus say that?
He didn’t speak English.
Won’t he have learned in heaven?
I know on earth everyone online must know English but they have no Internet in heaven.
How can you prove that?
Heaven was  there before it was invented
So was England!
I see what you mean.But if they had the internet it would make them sad to see us being so cruel to the vulnerable.
But only if they knew English!
Well for your penance write to the Council and ask for unisex lavatories.
I thought they were all the same except some have  differet handles.
I mean that there will be just lots of loos for all races, sexes, and genders.You won’t have to prove you are biologically man or woman.
OK, Father and I will keep a diary of my sins online
Will it allow comments
I’ll have to see how I feel.
You feel nice to me.
How do you know?
Because I am your cat.
How did you get in there?
The priest is in love with me!
I DON’T BELIEVE IT!

I was in the doldrums again  this morning
{Is it a department  store?]
I didn’t feel like moving
[Where to ?]
So I said, come on, Mary.
{Is that your invisible friend?]
So I walked down the Shambles.
Then up to the Minster.
Then I said, God , if you exist, do something
So he said, I’m in the Doldrums as well.
{ So he’s read the Ancient Mariner]
So I stood there and suddenly rain fell.
Then he said, oh, I meant that for Egypt
I said, surely you have more?
Can’t you reverse time and make the rain turn into a cloud?
He said, I’m too lazy
[Can God be lazy?]
I said, how come you speak English
[You were rather rude]
He said, do you prefer French?
I said, well they write a good letter.
Do they still use pens?
What for?
What do you think?
You don’t mean?
I never  believed in Freud,
He was ok it was his readers  who were wrong
Did they read him naively?
That’s one way of looking at it.They thought if we all  had sex all the time we’d no longer be neurotic
That was before Hardy WineStain came here.
I agree
Me too!

In a  spiral of confusing pain
Memories absent hang on new desires
We  disconnect  from  love and its  cousins

We plunge  to  blackness, we are stricken, maimed
The shock of cold has altered love’s gold fires
To a   blizzard of confusing pain

Some feel guilty; others flush with shame
For this holy love is not for hire
We   must connect, with  skill, the heart ‘s remains

Reckon not, account not, for the blame
Like the falcon in its programmed gyre
Turning, turning in  delusions plain

The red sun gleams, the word is here, unveiled
Dread and woe   make all men into  liars
They disconnect  from  love  and its  travails

Struggling in the stuckness of the mire
In the camps with  boundaries of barbed wire
In  the triumph of the Nietzschean male
We were cursed and culture  was derailed

I saw the light and now I’m acting gay
Spring is  on the wing and birds appear
It is time for   Oedipus to pray

Don’t need no whip, the government  is grey
They’re chased by demons, seems they’ve come up  here,
I saw the light and now I’m feeling gay

Who needs a bed when there’s a load of hay
Bread and cheese and a large mug of beer?
Doubtless, it is time for lions to pray

The piper called and asked us for his pay
The road to hell ‘s a motorway that veered
I saw red lights and now I’m feeling flayed

I bought this lamp for tuppence on eBay
Go to Winder, so we’ll see the mere
Doubtless, it is time for  wolves to prey

My husband sinned and now  he’s being smeared
Just because the milkman was  King Lear
I saw the theatre burn and Macbeth play.
A wheel , oh there’s a  potter with the clay

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-synecdoche.html

Synecdoche Forms

There are several different forms of synecdoche examples including:

• A synecdoche may use part of something to represent the entire whole.
• It may use an entire whole thing to represent a part of it.
• It can use a word or phrase as a class that will express less or more than the word or phrase actually means.
• It may use a group of things that refer to a larger group or use a large group to refer to a smaller group.
• A synecdoche may also refer to an object by the material it is made from or refer to the contents in a container by the name of the container.

Here are examples of each type of synecdoche.

Part to Represent Whole

It is common in our language for part of something to be used to represent the whole.

For example:

• The word “bread” can be used to represent food in general or money (e.g. he is the breadwinner; music is my bread and butter).
• The word “sails” is often used to refer to a whole ship.
• The phrase “hired hands” can be used to refer to workmen.
• The word “head” refers to cattle.
• The word “wheels” refers to a vehicle.

Whole to Represent a Part

Using the whole to refer to a part is also a common practice in speech today.

For example:

• At the Olympics, you will hear that the United States won a gold medal in an event. That actually means a team from the United States, not the country as a whole.
• If “the world” is not treating you well, that would not be the entire world but just a part of it that you’ve encountered.
• The word “society” is often used to refer to high society or the social elite.
• The word “police” can be used to represent only one or a few police officers.
• The “pentagon” can refer to a few decision-making generals.
• “Capitol Hill” refers to both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

Read more at http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-synecdoche.html#eqwRpost3UZ4KdLa.99

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

http://www.azquotes.com/author/32483-Wilfred_Bion

It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating and communicating thought.

The shock of glossy holly leaves alight
Rivals the enrapturement by art
Like Magdalen does when floodlit in the dark
Such beauty  has  its power and its might

Lack of expectation opens eyes
Too used to seeing what is always seen
So into  open channels flow light’s streams
Shaking our assumptions and our lies.

Life can be restricted but intense;
Abandoning all hope is one way out.
While being circumspect with mistress doubt
We  may find  uncommon  self by sense

Looking out I see the entire world
While in a shell a tiny snail is curled

• Photo by author
• “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.” – Jack Kornfield
• 

“Contrary to the conventional wisdom, refusing to forgive or have further contact with an unrepentant, abusive relative is therapeutic.” Unknown

The Warsaw Ghetto 1940

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/10/polands-jews-fear-future-under-new-holocaust-law-nazi-atrocities

Extract

One lesser-known memorial is a small plaque on the wall of the Warszawa Gdańska railway station, a nondescript socialist-era building on the north side of the city. It was from here that many Poles of Jewish origin departed in the wake of the “anti-Zionist campaign” in March 1968, when cold war politics and a power struggle within the Polish Communist party led to an antisemitic propaganda campaign forcing thousands of Polish Jews to leave the country.

“Loyalty to socialist Poland and imperialist Israel is not possible simultaneously,” prime minister Józef Cyrankiewicz had declared in 1968. “Whoever wants to face these consequences in the form of emigration will not encounter any obstacle.” The plaque bears a tribute from the Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg: “For those who emigrated from Poland after March 1968 with a one-way ticket. They left behind more than they had possessed.”

Decide with me
Past walls of heaving lies.
Past politicians, who shall be the Bride?
Decisions fly like demons on the tide.
Grab Satan”s tail and take a free and evil ride.

I fear no pill
Can help the poor and reft.
All of their payments
Are to be
Put to the cracked Test.
We do not help
For passive is our state.
Send us to Bedlam for we are adrift.

Postmodernism
Says all stories are good
But we must sift them
With our heads of wood.
I fear no evil
For soon I think I`ll be
Driven to seek asylum
By the cold and Northern sea

Things my mother used to say, come back
Oh,Lord love a duck, she seems to quack
This caused me much confusion and deep thought
As  on  her words,  my mind seems to be caught

“I’m in the doldrums,I am stuck, bemused”
Hearing this made children feel confused
Since she lost her mother when so young
Dejection, like a garment, on her hung.

When I was unhappy with my dress
She made me feel much worse by her address
“The king won’t  look at you ,you little pest”
I used to long  eternally for   rest

Sometimes she would open the front door
Push me out,”don’t come back anymore”
I see the power and not the love she claimed
Although I do not judge, I feel ashamed

No separation,self or boundary
The only escape I found was to flee
But still, I do recall her homemade bread
And how she called,”I wish that I was dead”

I lay in bed and could not get to sleep
O mother, mother, how you make me weep

Why do we need to be told what to do? A  magazine agony aunt column had a question from 55-year-old divorcee asking was it now expected that women go to bed on a first date?
Why could she not decide herself? Is it fear of not being wanted? I think it might be dangerous unless you already know the person.On the other hand, Freud might say it is she who wants sex immediately and she projects it onto the man who is seen as rapacious.
Why again can’t we think for ourselves? A man could be thrilled at easy access to sex but where will it lead? It is harder to lose someone anyway and after getting so close it would be even more painful.

Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive
Sex and violence, lovelessness and hate
Which man or woman can we now believe?

At home, the wedded wife  has been deceived
Maybe she is old and has no taste
Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive.

And is there any good that’s been conceived
Or merely human life that’s laid to waste?
Which man or woman can we now believe?

A tipping point eventually’s achieved
Women  furious at their  common fate
Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive.

For a world of love, we all will grieve
Is it now and always much too late
Which man or woman can we now believe?

No wonder we prefer our phones to mates
And women fear when they go on a date
Pandora’s box has opened, I perceive
Is there nothing good we can retrieve?

From the mangled chaos of the lines
Emerge strange forms and all too telling tales
O life satanic and O loss divine

Faces will make then themselves, define
From the compost and the deathly rail
And the mangled chaos of the lines

There is never reason nor a rhyme
As Jonah found when sucked in by a whale
O life satanic and o loss divine

What is living but a life of crime?
Whether trained in Borstal or at Yale
Feel the mangled chaos of the lines

We wander, having leaders well outgrown
Some days it is hell and we just crawl
O life satanic and o loss divine

I believe, in bitterness and gall,
We must hold our spirits as they fall
Dark the mangled chaos of our lives
O love satanic and O loss divine

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2018/02/change-the-world?utm_source=Poetry+Foundation&utm_campaign=2bf845f8c7-POFO_Newsletter_DEC_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ff7136981c-2bf845f8c7-185545637

Extract

It’s been a brutal year, and I have been wondering how to speak in a world that doesn’t seem interested in listening to things searingly urgent to me.

Because I wanted to think about that with others, this fall I taught a class on listening and voicing. I wanted to counter our unlistening, and I wanted to think about who gets to voice, how they get to voice, and how we listen to each other. My late friend Akilah Oliver’s notion of the “visible unseen” was one way we framed things. She wrote a poem-essay, “the visible unseen,” as part of her grieving and healing process when her son Oluchi died. In it, she considers how graffiti makes visible the invisible body that made it. She writes,

When I first saw graffiti, I recognized an ugly ecstatic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history.

There is so much to say about that, but the best thing to do is to read that passage again, and then, if you haven’t already, to read her book, A Toast in the House of Friends.

We read a lot of other poets and writers in that class: Dolores Dorantes’s chillingly beautiful Style, translated by Jen Hofer, Layli Long Soldier’s much- and rightly lauded Whereas, Amiri Baraka’s essay “How You Sound??” We did crazy listening exercises inspired by the late great composer Pauline Oliveros, who wrote things like:

Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.

Loosely translating “the visible unseen” into the spoken unheard, Sappho was another starting point. She is a poetic mother who keeps on giving, maybe (for me) because my great grandmother took her as a guardian angel for inventing a way to be a lesbian in the early 20^th century, but maybe just because she’s amazing. In fragment 31 (quoted here in Anne Carson’s translation), all her senses famously flee from her body as she watches, in a cold sweat, the woman she desires talking to some man — “whoever he is”:

I shall eventually reclaim all my bed
The empty space is full of books I read.
But still it’s very hard to get inside
Next to the place where someone loved has died.
And so my entire house is filled with books
Or clothes and shoes and radios, please  don’t look
As bit by bit  I let in emptiness~
By gum, life’s harder than a game of chess
Then when I’m empty, I can wait for grace
Or find another man, but not in haste
As I  may be gay for all I know
It never rains but sometimes we get snow

This is the story of my washing machine.It’s a perfectly ordinary washing machine I bought 2 years ago.Like all of these, it has more programmes than I ever could need unless I married a widower with 54 grandchildren and 3 dogs and a horse that likes a clean blanket
As a highly educated person it was only natural I should lock my brain onto a 59-minute programme with a choice of several temperatures.And how I used that programme until about 6 months ago it stopped working suddenly and Hoover wanted me to buy an insurance policy for £197 per year
As the machine only cost about £250 it seemed a daft  idea so I have got by using other programmes
Then today it came to my mind that there is also a choice of spinning speeds.I changed that and was pleased to find the programme began to work again at a different spin  speed
Why did the engineer on the phone not tell me that?
Why did I not think of it myself? It would have been sensible to try different speeds but it never crossed my mind.
So at least it will save me having to buy a new one this year.
More puzzling is the amount of washing I have to do.I’ve a good mind to go back to the old ways of washing clothes more infrequently as in winter I find drying then a nuisance.
Anyway, remember to try a few changes if a  machine stops working.It might save you £300 or more
Now I have to dry the clothes!Not a day for hanging them out.It’s strange how I have never totally solved this problem.I have no tumble dryer as I have no space.So I shall drape sheets over my head and stand in front of the fire until either I faint or the sheet dries.This will be fun.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/the-25-principles-for-adult-behavior.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

“”But being a grown-up also meant accepting full responsibility for one’s behavior, life’s purpose, and the ethical treatment of oneself and others. See his list below, notable not so much for its originality but for its plainspoken reminder of the simple, shared wisdom that gets drowned in the assaultive noise of modern life. Such uncomplicated idealism was at the center of Perry’s life and work.

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Remember that love forgives everything.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

Barlow the “cowboy, poet, romantic, family man, philosopher, and ultimately, the bard of the digital revolution”—as Stephen Levy describes him at Wired—“became a great explainer” of the possibilities inherent in new media. He watched the internet become a far darker place than it had ever been in the 90s, a place where governments conduct cyberwars and impose censorship and barriers to access; where bad actors of all kinds manipulate, threaten, and intimidate.”