When we live so close to the cliff edge
So even one small shudder knocks us down
We must choose our attitude with calm
And not for rage or anger ever dredge.
When we live too close

Some  are saved by one outstanding ledge
They suffer shock but not much-dreaded harm
Yet we cannot trust mere Chance’s arm.
Nor on hoping for a climber’s wedge
When we live with choice

We need to know  that life awards no badge
We need to know what will be our special balm
In the imagination’s   proper realm
When we live so close to the cliff edge
When we wish to live without a grudge
When  our needs are close

When we are born into a happy space
We feel our vulnerability is held
And from  fragmented senses, a self weld
That feels a unity with its new place
When we are born

When we are born , the shock  must strike us hard
At  first , we were a fish in private seas
With mother’s breathing music,company.
Yet  force unknown from  this  sweet space us lured
When we were born

Oh, like the flowers, one day we will die
For some, it is a sudden accident
Or it may be a languid, long descent
Until in arms of angels, we will  cry
And our beloved spouses stand and sigh
Oh.  like the flowers.

When we begin the slow descent  to age
From that peak or maximum of strength
We notice nothing as it has no length
So feel no need to cry or scream in rage
When we begin.

The ” writing on the wall” is on the page.
The well off sink in angst, the workless tense;
We’ve lost our youth, our mind looks for defence
Then we begin the slow descent of age.
Then we begin.

The music that we hum is  a slow dirge
An elegy falls from every pen to page
I do not  feel it’s good that we should rage
But gently take the  shroud of silk or serge
As in the living earth, we all shall merge.
Then life begins again

How like a prison my dear home can feel
When waiting here for parcels to arrive.
The clothes that had such catalogue appeal
In Royal Mail vans were loaded for their drive.

After several days they’ve not appeared
The Escalation team attempt to trace
Meanwhile, I get writer’s block  from fear
You’d think they had to carve Big Ben  from ice.

At last, an answer, ring our famous store
They can  cancel any thing ordered
My lace and coloured wish, is wish no more
Sweet lingerie embroidered,  hors d’oeuvre.

I used my phone so much I’m turning grey
To think  for all this waiting I must pay.

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/phpBB//viewtopic.php?t=7459&start=780#p122680

I liked these two images very much.I imagine it is difficult to get an image of two butterflies at once.The second image showing the beautiful underside of the wings is beautiful.

These photos were taken just yesterday so if you live anywhere near a site where butterflies  are common take a trip out to see  them

Copyright Mike Flemming 2017

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/phpBB//viewtopic.php?t=7459&start=780#p122680

Th

The wonder of these flying flowers
We enjoy in daylight hours
Natural beauty, touch my soul
We pray then to be more whole

http://www.griefandsympathy.com/emotionsofgrief.html

“During the bereavement process, normal everyday mood swings reacting to all of the external problems of life still exist. On top of this you have to deal with the emotions of grief.

For this reason the mood swings and emotions of grief can be likened to being on a roller coaster ride, there are so many fast highs and lows. You can experience such a frenzy of changed moods, that some people think they must be going mad.

Check out Stephanie Ericsson’s book

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54864/a-history-without-suffering-

Speak to me, I cannot understand
Despite much thought and patient reverie
That chickens  never use elastic bands
Nor porcupines write daily news to me.

Speak  to me, I often wander here
In the ancient woodlands of the oak
Asking why the owls like drinking beer.
Asking why the robins like to smoke.

Speak to me, disrational is my mind
Despite my knowledge of the cubic form
Why are marionettes so very kind
Why do my own feet not keep me warm?

Speak to me, I  long to know the worst.
Has Theresa May left footprints in the church?

Reverberations of the ancient elegies
The coffin carried by the four dark men
Agitate the mind  with memory

He has gone and where will I  soon be?
Am I to live and utilise my pen
Remembering all the ancient elegies?

I’d like to ask him what beauty he could see
Before he smiled and dropped his head again
Don’t agitate the mind with memory.

Hamlet asked, to be or not to be
But most go quietly when it is their turn
Singing still the ancient elegies.

Can we trust the darkness we perceive
Where god hides his great mystery from man
Don’t agitate the mind with memory.

Violently, with passion, the young burn
Then  stone temples  harden as they learn
Reverberations of the ancient elegies
Wound the human mind  with memory

Intangible but evident like smoke
Like scents of perfumed oil left in the air
An essence of his presence seemed to speak.

My voice was dumb, my feelings ran amok
I knew he had passed through but all is bare
Intangible the evidence like smoke

The senses are not separate but leak
Like watercolour runs, like sorrow’s tears
An essence of his presence seemed to speak.

I strained to hear or see or to partake
But nobody yes, nobody was there.
Intangible that evidence, like smoke

Loss makes such great waves when a life breaks
Yet I am grateful for his loving  care
An essence of his person seems to speak.

Twice in life we humans are a pair
With mother and with spouse, if one appears
Intangible but evident like smoke
An echo of his lost voice seems to speak.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-donald-trump-political-depression-mental-health-2016-psychiatric-cbt-methods-heal-britain-a7528581.htmlPolitics

Quote:

So what is helpful? What’s the cure for political depression? For one thing, liberal conservatives are going to have to borrow from some of the left’s irrepressible optimism. But if my last few months of lethargy and dark doctors’ waiting rooms have taught me anything, it’s that all those in search of a cure for our current political malaise could do well to look at recent advances in the mental health ward. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, or CBT, is today’s wonder cure – but what does it actually entail, and can it save a country as well as it can a person?

CBT is all about breaking unhelpful mental patterns. It’s also about the art of the possible. Under pressure at work? Find one request you can reasonably make of your boss. Determined to run a marathon to feel better about being obese? Start by using the stairs instead of a lift.

In politics, focusing on the big picture can often seem overwhelming. The future is bleak; there are a lot of battles that the forces of liberalism seem unlikely to win. When I think of Trump in the White House, Erdogan imprisoning critics in Turkey, martial law in the Philippines – I could continue – I curl up and go back to bed. When I think about the two refugee friends who I’ve got coming to stay next week, I scurry up and start readying

Adrienne Rich on the Political Power of Poetry and Its Role in the Immigrant Experience

Quote:

Adrienne Rich — who spent a lifetime contemplating the relationship between art and capitalism and became the first and so far only person to refuse the National Medal of Arts in a political act of protest against the foibles of that relationship — considers poetry’s singular promise amid a culture increasingly preoccupied with the unfeeling superficialities of rampant capitalism:

Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

[…]

I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

[…]

Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions — not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.

With an eye to the commodification of feelings in contemporary culture, she considers the tragic resignation of despair — a notion the great humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm had examined half a century earlier in his timeless treatise on human destructiveness, and one which Rebecca Solnit would echo a decade later in her sobering clarion call for resisting the defeatism of easy despair. Rich writes:

We see despair when social arrogance and indifference exist in the same person with the willingness to live at devastating levels of superficiality and self-trivialization… Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat, is, like war, the failure of imagination.

One of Rich’s most potent points examines the role of poetry in the immigrant experience and in the flight from oppression. She considers poetry as a counterpoint to the problematic metaphor of the “melting pot”and writes:

There was a late woman from Devon
Who was still blogging when she got up to heaven
When God asked her why
She said “Though I died,
I still want to keep being lovin’.

The angels like laptop computers
And asked BT for some routers.
They need tech support,
So goes the report….
A new career dawns for tech tutors.

Gabriel could have sent Mary an email.
To fill her in on the details.
“God has impregnated you,
I’ll email Joe too,
As we don’t want this venture to fail.

In my heart, my love is still alive
I feel his presence just where eyes can’t reach
I need another person to survive.

I am angry but do not feel enraged
For all must die and life its lessons teach
In my heart, my love  still is alive.

As I write, my pen disturbs the page
The art of love is just beyond my reach
I need another person to survive.

We need another in order to engage
The wit, the sense, emotions that we seek
In my heart, my love is  still alive.

Could that ” other  “be my other side?
The part that dreams and sometimes needs to speak?
I need another person to survive.

Gentler than the rain’s sound on the street
The still small voice sends messages to greet
In my heart, his love is  now alive
I wed my  “other self” to loss survive.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/03/the_origins_of_postmodernism.html

In the words of Nietzsche,

Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-should-memorize

Extract

“My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972.

Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart.

I’m struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind it is unaltered.

Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory.

So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.)

The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat”

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/poetry-prophecy

“Whenever a catastrophe strikes, it’s incredibly common to see an outburst of apocalyptic mania. One of the most enduring and popular artifacts of such an outburst is “The Second Coming”, a poem written in the early 20’s by Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The inspiring catastrophe in question was, of course, World War I, which had recently ended; but Yeats was also influenced by the failed Easter Rising of 1916, when Irish Nationalists tried to obtain independence from Great Britain. In fact, Yeats wrote a poem, “Easter, 1916”, commemorating the fallen heroes, many of them personal friends, just a few months afterwards. But “The Second Coming” elevates Yeats’ sense of disillusion into a cosmic existentialism foretelling the very end of the world.

The poem is divided into three sections, although many publications divide it into two stanzas. In the first section, Yeats describes the intellectual and cultural atmosphere in Europe after the War, with a ‘falcon’, symbolizing mankind’s animalistic aggression, escaping from the control of its ‘Falconer’, the social codes of civilisation that had recently been blown apart. Without these codes, ‘things fall apart’, causing ‘mere anarchy’ and ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ to become ‘loosed’ upon the world (in this context, ‘mere’ means ‘total’). That these disasters are ‘loosed’ implies that they were always somewhere within us, but had previously been held in check. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity’- disillusioned by catastrophe, idealists completely give up, leaving a vacuum for more aggressive and violent people to take over. In less than fifteen years after the poem was published, the Nazi party would take over Germany.”