Author: Katherine

Poetry writer and author

“Plea for a measure of abnormality”

Should all who live be forced into a mould
and aberrations be abhorred like fleas?
Are we who differ thrown into the cold…
Or tossed alive into green wintry seas?

The mere normal’s a poor measure of life.
For what is normal,how is it defined?
And is peace normal,or should we say it’s strife?
And what is normal speech?Is it refined?

Each of us has need to find a place
Where we can stand as on a hidden rock.
We need true pride and  with it we need grace.
Soon then our precious talents will unblock
,
In strangeness even oddness,there’s much good,
Let’s kill not hope; let’s change our hearts to glad.

To come: plea for a measure of animosity!

Window

Church at night

This is article very interesting especially as we rarely learn much now about the connection of English with Old Norse.No doubt the Government don’t believe it will add to our ability to gain employment stacking the freezers in supermarkets with horsemeat burgers or similar activities.

I found this in wilipedia .. link below

Etymology

The word window originates from the Old Norse ‘vindauga’, from ‘vindr – wind’ and ‘auga – eye’, i.e. “wind eye”. In Norwegian Nynorsk and Icelandic the Old Norse form has survived to this day (in Icelandic only as a less used synonym to gluggi), in Swedish the word vindöga remains as a term for a hole through the roof of a hut, and in the Danish language ‘vindue’ and Norwegian Bokmål ‘vindu’, the direct link to ‘eye’ is lost, just like for ‘window’. The Danish (but not the Bokmål) word is pronounced fairly similarly to window.

Window is first recorded in the early 13th century, and originally referred to an unglazed hole in a roof. Window replaced the Old English ‘eagþyrl’, which literally means ‘eye-hole,’ and ‘eagduru’ ‘eye-door’. Many Germanic languages however adopted the Latin word ‘fenestra’ to describe a window with glass, such as standard Swedish ‘fönster’, or German ‘Fenster’. The use of window in English is probably due to the Scandinavian influence on the English language by means of loanwords during the Viking Age. In English the word fenester was used as a parallel until the mid-18th century and fenestration is still used to describe the arrangement of windows within a façade. Also, words such as “defenestration” are in use, meaning to throw something out of a window.

From Webster’s 1828 Dictionary: Window, n. [G. The vulgar pronunciation is windor, as if from the Welsh gwyntdor, wind-door.][3]

tablet

I love this poem

chester maynes's avatarchester maynes

silhouette of us pressed
on a photograph left
a history of our past
winding through my
thoughts as i re-examine
the sweet early years of
our dear life
short-lived by the horror
of one rainy night

i feel your cold hands
visiting me while
i dream about you
and your absence
makes me long
for you first thing
in the morning

my tears re-visit me
over the cycle of years
and i travel the road
without you and
this is more than
a misery unwanted

darker are the nights
bluer are the days
abandoned like me

you left me dreaming
a home with you
but you’re gone

2012-2014

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Now there is no vertical

When you struck me,I vibrated like a kettle drum,
then as smaller percussions and repercussions
echoing from all the glassy surfaces
creating a balletic geometry of sound tracks
in space and time.

When you knocked me down,
I fell against her and her and her;
we were like a row of skittles
and we all went down with the lifeboat;
The infinite chain of being is.

When you hit me,the Fall spread across the world
Now there is no Vertical
All is undivine and graceless.
By the Rod it’s ruled

When you left me,I left myself,the world,the rocks,dry land
I weighed down sank to the ocean bed
with coral eyes
gazing.

When you struck my mind
I became an instrument of a foreign power
Singing a song I didn’t know.

When the glass was smashed
the splinters flew into all our hearts.
You didn’t know what we couldn’t see.

I lay on barren ground and gave birth
To my own Creator in the desert.

The Conscientious Objector by Karl Shapiro

The Conscientious Objector

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail
More tense than felons but relieved to find
The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped
From every mother’s windowpane, obscene
The bloodlust sweating from the public heart,
The dog authority slavering at your throat.
A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind
Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean.

The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light
Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew
Troubling the captains for plain decencies,
A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out
To establish new theocracies to west,
A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas
Ten miles above the sodomites and fish.
These inmates loved the only living doves.

Like all men hunted from the world you made
A good community, voyaging the storm
To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat;
Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed,
The gaunt politicals construed our hate.
The opposite of all armies, you were best
Opposing uniformity and yourselves;
Prison and personality were your fate.

You suffered not so physically but knew
Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind.
Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach
Erupting in his face damn all your kind.
Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us
Are equally with those who shed the blood
The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is
What we come back to in the armistice.

Karl Shapiro

The difference between sin and crime

Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Cain_slaying_Abel,_1608-1609

The best exposition I have found on this comes from  the Judaic religion.I am sure that in other religions there are similar expositions but I have not found any yet.This one is also good because it’s about the Day of Atonement and whatever our religion we all have a lot to atone for..

http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/vayelekh/suc.html

iolo refunded me

Window cleaner at work
Window cleaner at work (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
English: The United States Esperanto: Loko de ...
English: The United States Esperanto: Loko de Usono sur la terglobo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

iolo have a chat system.After I told them my problems they refunded me.I said I cannot phone USA so they  did it by chat on line.But I said I was going to talk to the police about their daily demands for money by email.And I did not trust them enough to use System Mechanic.Then they offered to refund me

United States
United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Related articles

Beats like my heart

Clock on the mantelpiece beats like my heart

More regular.not affected by emotion,vision,thought.

Cats stand proudly in their grey stone bodies

As if at the entrance to some other world.

The heating comes on with a bump,

and suddenly darkness has come to earth.

Clock,clock forever beating,

Will my heart outstay you?

will you tick for someone else?

Though strong in silver case

you feel nothing

give me another heart instead

to share my feelings.

Let another heart beat alongside mine,

and we’ll be tuned in unison,

sing our song of love,

or heartbreak.Human,made of flesh

We will drop like leaves

still the infernal clock beats steadily

controlled by,not love

but radio waves.Imagine now

these waves multi-layered across the earth

carrying shopping lists,time,date.

whilst we go on living ,

hearts fluttering  like a cloud of butterflies,

see they go now

climbing away

into the soft tenderness of your hands

So wonderful.

I am so narcissistic I reblog my own posts.

I am so egocentric I look in the mirror when I am walking down the ahigh street and keep selfies of myself in my head

I am so beautiful I have to wear a veil in the bath.

I am so logical I deduced I was dead as I had not moved all night… but then I remembered Descartes and got up.

I keep mentalising all day and dreaming all night.Where will it end?

The North facing coast of Norfolk UK

Long pale sands,
the strand,the white topped rollers,
holier than the Eucharist,
sun kissed waves,
three coloured cliffs
Whiffs of scent of broom and gorse
winds make us hoarse
sea salt coarse
oh,  to be walking there with you
And the sky so blue
Higher than any view

From those lost lands of long ago

In the land which dreams dwell in
where love and hate and life begin;
where swiftly the deep rivers flow
from those lost lands of long ago.
I wander through wild poppy fields
Underfoot the dark earth yields….
I see the flowering fruit trees start
Their blossoms gather round my heart…
I hear the sparrows sing with joy
And bees their busy wings employ.
In those lost lands I saw your face
And now I long for your embrace.
Are you real, am I deceived?
From this earth we all must leave.
Earth to earth and ash to ash
Glory,pride and boasting pass.
Leave me now,my dearest one
Soon I too will be called on.
Nothing lasts but love is real
Remember that and your ideals..
Earth to earth, we rest in clay
We must give all self away
Softly on this earth I roam
Seeking still my love and home,
for until the very end
Love and kindness may descend.
Soft as wings of butterflies
Tears well up and wet my eyes.
My heart has melted into yours

And thus we live and die like flower

It shall be so

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Gently dancing in the sun
Wildflowers grow;
they bloom,
are gone.

With no thoughts,they have no cares;
Yet their lives are gentle prayers.
May I walk in such a way
That I am alive to this day.

So I see with widening view,
And joy and sorrows embrace too.
Then my time will come, like yours...
And of us nothing  endures.
As to the earth our bodies go,
All are one;it shall be so

Do you have trouble with surds,too? I can’t creak sometimes.

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And no,I never made a Freudian slip in my wife,said Fred.
I am always very careful when I leak.
How about you, he asked…
Me,not even wild meadowplants could drag a herd out of me,I told him cautiously.
So neither of us ever takes a miss ever? he whispered.
I think you have made a terror,I said.
It was not really spurious, he said.I’ve always had a problem with surds all my life… how about you?
Surds are ok,it’s insolubility that troubles me.
And with that we partied on reasonable worms

Please keep your stare on

2012-01-22

Necessary evil is a verbal construct

Rapacity under the cover of contenvion is still greed

My nerves have weals he said.Could he mean wheels?

I am as nervous as a naked nun in a room full of people who go to bed in fur coats

Never pull off tomorrow what you can ease off today.

Keep your stare on!

If you never get dressed,you need never undress.

I took out a new lease on his wife,She is frilled.

.He bought me an apron for Xmas so I fried it for his dinner.That will do the trick… next year he may give me a pork sausage and some sauce.Though I have plenty already.

And no,I never made a Freudian slip in my wife.

He said he wants to borrow my life! Interesting.

The good things my mother taught me

#

Gravity

The good things my mother taught me

are too numerous to list

here or even on a large hoarding

I could rent for a week by the train station.

She gave me my blue eyes and my love of stories

and tolerated the fact that, I like my father,would learn

for the sake of it and not with a view to earning money.

She praised my sense of color though not my three year research scholarship

to place of higher learniing

would rather I curled my hair and smiled at boys.

But my destiny was determined by the fact that I never could

master that Singer sewing machine she had

so I had to learn Theoretical Physics to make up for it.

And here I am now,thinking of her home made bread

her showing me how to read music

and the names of the keys on the piano.

I know I was a big disappointment in not marrying into money

or becoming a saint or virgin and martyr,well martyr anyway

She always believed me to be a virgin, even after marriage;

and it’s true I was a virgin with regard to common sense

getting on in society and all related issues.

Some ordinary female knowledge never penetrated me

so I’d sit in the rain wondering what tolerance was

or how Pascal got to lie in bed so much,and whether I could too

because I got creative ideas in bed—

not what you may be thinking of—–

She always changed the sheets and washed our clothes however poor

we were…

And made us dresses from scraps of fabric

That’s how we learned geometry,with the trapeze dress……

Numbers we learned from the stars and excitement from playing with boys

in a disused brickfield.

Strange what makes us who we are,but

the biggest contribution comes from mothers

and just to please her I hope as well as all my academic success

one day I’ll make myself a dress out of some rare print

embodying simultaneously both male and female design and shape

And she’ll look down and say,

She always had her head in the clouds,in a book,in the smoke

patterns from Dad’s cigarettes, in a dream and a whirl

but she did have a good sense of color.

Yeah,she is my daughter

Yeah,once I imagined I must be adopted but

Yeah.I’m her daughter.

She’s my mother.

Yer she’s gone.

The Bible extra number 1

aikido-cat

And it came to pass that they ate their dinner
and that she did washeth up.
And she did leave the dishes to drain
Whilst she put on the washing machine.
and the man was very pleased.

And it further came to pass
that she gave the man some pudding
and he was more pleased.
And then it came to pass the he fell asleep
By the fire.

And the Lord God,said
who is this man that sleepeth by his fire?
And He said,I shall waken him up
And the man awoke,
And God spake unto him

How is it that the woman laboureth in ye kitchen.
And that thou sleepeth here in an armchair.
And the man said,
But Thou didst order women to labour.
And the Lord God said unto the man
Why dost thou remember so selectively what I have said?
And the man said,
I knoweth not and therefore I will help this woman.
And the Lord God said,
Why dost thou not think of it thyself?
And the man said in reply,
It was Thou that made me,O God.

And the Lord God was displeased with the man.
so he called down a plague of butterflies
To prevent him from sleeping.
And when the woman came in
she was much pleased to see these butterflies
and so she fell onto the man
And he did make love unto her.
And the cat was very pleased.

For it thrilled a cat to watch humans loving
and gave him hope
That the Lord God would take his rib and make a mate for him.
And indeed it doth seem to have happened
Judging by all the cats staring in ye old window here;
And by their ecstatic yelps
That the Lord God was very generous with them
and made them many mates.
For truly there is no jealousy among them
And they mate freely and happily
and never have rows about the washing up..
as they eat straight from the can.Amen

Here endeth today’s lesson.
Be thou kind to thy mate always

The alphabet by Karl Shapiro

The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Unsacrifices the bled son of man
Yet plaits his crown of thorns.

Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman
Past synagogues of patient time,
Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose,
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women
Past the almost natural crime,
Past the still speaking embers of ghettos,
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.
These are the letters that all men refuse
And will refuse until the king arrives
And will refuse until the death of time
And all is rolled back in the book of days.

The Atheist Sex Scandal

This is witty

hessianwithteeth's avatarhessianwithteeth

Humans are tribal creatures. Let’s face it, we don’t like it when our “group” is accused of things, even if those accusations are accurate. For the last few years, I have been disappointed to see people who identify as atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and secular humanists defending members of “our group” who have been accused of sexual assault to a ridiculous degree. Many people seem to be so unwilling to accept that such a crime could happen at conferences that they attend, and could be perpetrated by people that they idolize. I can understand this reaction to a certain degree: who wants to find out that their hero could so casually hurt another human being? But at the same time, these are people who claim to hold rationality above all else and yet they are reacting on pure instinct.
So I’ve decided to put together this little project. Okay, so it’s…

View original post 309 more words

Who were Cain and Abel?

Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Cain_slaying_Abel,_1608-1609

Cain slaying Abel by Rubens

We should know that the Hebrew Bible [on which the Christian Old Testament is based] was never taken literally by the Jews.These are stories,parables,lessons which need constant study and deliberation and study..

So the story of Cain and Abel  may be interpreted in different ways.For sure though,jealousy between brothers is still raging through the human psyche… and it may simply be that and its consequences.

But today I read that it may be  the story of how Neanderthal man Abel who would have hunted for flesh was killed off by homo sapiens who developed methods of growing grain which enabled humans to settle build  villages and to eventually develop civilisation ranging  from handwriting and numbers to laws and taxation and of course,war.Ironically the home of civilisation is the Middle East.So Cain and Abel were from different species but both human.And the story may be about guilt,that we killed other humans and we remain aggressive and warlike.I shall put some links here.

http://www.science20.com/hawkins_science/blog/could_story_cain_abel_be_story_genocide_neanderthals

Just writing

I writing to you

Writing

Just writing

When I got your message

yes, a message

You say my words are not right

My words,

not to write..

Orders come to your mind

Stop writing that way

I don’t like your verse.

I was just writing a note

I have it here

He said,I have wounded

Wounded him

Words like small steel daggers

Have pierced him through.

Seems there’s nothing to do

Oh,nothing.

A blankness….

My heart has gone mute..

I’m still as a frightened doe

I’m hiding.

What wrongs did we do?

We fell into grief

Like a fluttering leaf

I’m hiding

What did he do then?

Why is this so

Love grows richer every passing day

When first I saw your limpid pale blue eyes

That held me with a merry loving look

I then fell into love without surprise

Without consulting people or a book.

My heart was struck and rang out like a bell..

Like crystal struck by silvery rod or spoon.

And yet I hesitated,you could tell…

Is love a treasure or a road to doom?

For in the past,love’s robbed me of my soul.

I gave so much and gained not at all.

But with your love I felt I could be whole…

Free from those whose very touch appalled.

The sun looked down and smiled upon your face

As we held each other in a tight embrace