Category: reflections

Contractions

We lose our health we lose our lovers friends

Death comes slow but faster at the end

Now we can’t afford to use the lights

We feebly rage against the coming night.

Once our life expanded as we grew

Every year was filled with actions new.

Marriage job promotion travel fun

We never thought that one day we’d be done.

Who can fight against the dying light?

Once so strong and fierce your heart gave up

Oh my love I miss you in the night..

Filled with sorrow, we must drain the cup.

Aging is like dying everyday

Slowly slowly each life ebbs away

Soaring soul

A  robin came in after you had died
The little bird is missing you like me
After hopping round, away birds fly

You sat there in the kitchen looking kind
The birds were eating crumbs left from our tea
The  robin looked in after you had died

Should I see it as a  subtle sign?
Once a bird tapped on the window here
I  knew   the meaning as I sadly sighed

After hopping round, away birds fly.
Their delicacy, their size haunts me like fear
The  robin looked in after you had died 

I wish the  bird  had stayed a little while
I wish I were up North near Windermere
On a  boat that sails  till my heart smiles

Oh, for another  one to  share , to steer
I miss your hands so warm and once so near
A  robin called by after you had died
With your soaring soul the small birds  fly

Maps and roads

London is bewildered by its roads
The Circular, the North,the South, the Codes
The Morse and the Enigma Turing broke
So now we have new bicycles with spokes

Once we had the A to Z in hand
Turn it upside down and you’ll be grand
New technology has made gigantic strides
Carrying us to Eden ,what a ride

The motorways are empty for tonight
God decided we had too much Light
He taught the bare cheeked Moon on Jesus’ mount
To turn the other side when love’s about

I liked to use a compass and a map
But now, my dear, most everything’s on tap
I crouch beneath my sister as she drives
In the dark on the M 25

But if it’s closed, we are completely foxed
We left the old Road Atlas in a box
Along with all my ex’s underpants
And naturally his principles of Kant

We may be in Watford or in Bucks
I often wonder what will rhyme with luck
We may be near St Alban’s, we can’t see
The car ran up the trunk of this oak tree

We rang 999 and they are her
A fire engine filled  with Kentish beer
A ladder for the ladies to climb down
Now they are just women on the town

London won’t exist ,destroyed by cars
Angry men who cannot find a bar

Sculpture as metaphor

Sculpture makes a metaphor look real
We can use more senses than our sight
We see the body hollow where we feel

Seeing, touching,sensing all appeal
If there is sufficient sun and light
Sculpture makes a metaphor look real

We feel it in our gut, how can it steal
The feeling of our innards in the night
We see the metal hollow where we feel

The heart has broken up and disappeared
No more time to love or lust ignite
Sculpture makes a metaphor too real

To admit another’s sorrow makes us fear
Denial as the cock crows ending night
We see the body’s hollow where we feel

Oh, will such bald agony take flight
Can we hold the grief in our insides?
Sculpture makes a metaphor so real
We see the grieving empty and unpeeled

A single rose

The fewer our possessions are, the better.

If you have no bread you need no butter.

Turn away from Envy Use your will.

If there is no illness there’s no pill

Comparisons are painful to the weak

If you and rhey persist the outlook’s bleak.

Be grateful you can see and feel and taste

The wonders of perception go to waste.

When we lose a sense we realise

Nothing can replace our ears and eyes.

Adding more possessions makes more work.

In the maze of choice do not get stuck

In the empty space perception grows

Lots of weeds or just a single rose

Joy and woe

The music of the fountain in the pond

The warmth of July sun on face and hands

How you liked sit here for an hour.

And how you loved the shrubs and little flowers.

I still can’t be here without feeling sad.

And yet inside my heart I’m also glad.

For while you lost your appetite for food

Sitting in the courtyard did you good.

And when the little tulips shared their heads

Your joy was sweet, my lover oh our bed.

When you were too weak to hug me more

The images of tulips through me poured.

I close my eyes and see them once again

This helps me survive the grievous pain.

For joy and woe are woven and are one.

The fabric of our life can’t be undone

Is empathy a good thing?

 

 

lepanthes_adrianaehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/19/think-empathy-makes-world-better-place-think-again

 

“The main problem with empathy is that it works like a spotlight, highlighting certain people in the here and now, making their suffering salient to you. This can sometimes be a good thing. Indeed, one of the best arguments in favour of empathy is that it really does make you kinder to the person you are empathising with. This is backed by laboratory research, by everyday experience and by common sense.

So if the world were a simple place, where the only difficulties one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.

But the world is not a simple place. One problem is that empathy is innumerate, favouring the one over the many. In one classic series of studies, psychologists asked some subjects how much money they would give to help develop a drug that would save the life of one child and asked others how much they would give to save eight children. People would give roughly the same in both cases. But when a third group of subjects was told the child’s name and shown her picture, the donations shot up – now there were greater donations to the one than to the eight. All of these laboratory effects can be seen as manifestations of what has been called “the identifiable victim effect”.”

No religion but  a sense of awe

If we had no language,we’d be good
No communication but by sense
What devil conjured up the demon word
Made our dealings complex and intense?

No Tower of Babel, nothing but mud huts
Caressing,kissing,kicking, real contac
Boxing,wrestling,killing the unjust
No law except the fist. no guilt.no wrack

No religion but a sense of awe
The rising sun, the moon, the distant stars
Oh,bow before the Cedar and the Oak
Anything that is taller than we are

No books, no news no media,no war
It makes me wonder what live words are for

Theatre forms the soul

When the fruit has rotted on the stalk
Bruised and broken like the poor in need
When  leaders meet  but rarely truly talk
When children caught in cross fire lie and bleed

Don’t we see God’s Kingdom is a joke
One hundred million deaths in two world wars
Not quick death but tortured bodies broke
They lost once and  love dies in their gore

Utopia, evolution, grandiose plans
Sacrifice yourself for those to come
We saw  the  little children hand in hand
Ground mines blow them up, they could not run

One thing’s clear, God’s here or not at all
The  future’s fiction, theatre   forms  the soul

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The little black  tents,  the  wombs of the night

Opportunity knocked and I opened the door
But that’s not the room I was looking for.
The light didn’t work and I slipped on a book
Then I saw you and your smile and your look

We don’t know what we want until it comes by
I’m too ancient now;who knows when they die?
But while I am here, I’m enjoying the peace
Of being alone, smiling, and writing re geese.

Isee aaaaal them fly by when the sun starts to sink.
How like a wild god; they ‘re gone when I blink.
Then they descend ;they all move as one.
No training in music could teach us that song.

Evoking the beauty of stars far away,
I like to watch geese at the end of the day.
Patterns and poems disclose other worlds.
The hand of a baby; the fingers uncurled

The trust and the smile ; mother is home
She creates entire worlds for the one she has borne.
For chaos and panic are not far away;
Even in adults who don’t care to say.

The little hands touch me so deeply, so well;
How come the world holy is rolling to hell?
How can we kill little wains by the score?
Was it for this that I opened your door?

Was it for this love electrified us?
We were lost in each other, as moved the white dove.
Was it for war that we lent love our wombs
Making more soldiers and building more tombs?

The bombs, they are loading; they’re having parades.
It’s not North Korea, it’s Washington, dude.
Let the tanks roll on Corrie and the Bedouin tribes.
Let the allies laugh blindly as weak Jesus dies.

O take me, dear mother.Please take me away
I can’t see no point in saying my prayers.
The leaders’ religions are making God frown.
The desert is empty, the tents all dragged down.

The centuries of living , so free, so mobile
The Holy Land blessing; they pause for while.
The little black tents, the wombs of the night,
Are all gone to shredders; they’re out of our sight.

Leave evil for good

From anguish,pain and paranoia flee

Into calm and joyful states of mind

Keep your balance so that you can see

To yourself and all the lost be kind

Do not linger in the shopping mall.

Do not meet the ladies as they lunch

Flee to parks and gardens, flowers and soil.

Flee to sandy beaches,find a bench.

If you feel such hatred, what’s the evidence?

If you have been wronged oh do not sulk.

Much good in life arrives by happenstance.

Do not cling to angry thoughts in bulk.

Exercise your body with romance

Even nasty places give a start

To finding the true path with mind and heart

My watercolour love

Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_-_Norham_Castle,_Sunrise_-_WGA23182

Though our colours mingled, the earliest remain.
Two watercolor paintings without frames,
Became one picture over time,
Yet two of us still there.
Our colours blended naturally,
Now all the hues are shared.

I love your colours flowing into mine:
Together they have made a new design.
A Watercolor painted by the rain;
We shall go, but our Watercolor Love will still remain

Related articles

Anne Lamott’s writing tips

rosaalchemyst2019https://writingcooperative.com/anne-lamotts-top-13-writing-tips-7577eb5d5c24

 

8. Writing is fueled by hard work rather than innate talent.

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts…For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” -Anne Lamott

Lamott’s line about “shitty first drafts” has gotten a lot of airtime in the writing community. Many writers seem to use it as a rallying cry.

To me, this quote is a great reminder of the fact that authorship is not a land of “haves” and “have-nots.” The world population has not been divided into capable writers and hopeless wannabes.

If even the best writers in the world struggle to write beautiful prose, we know that writing is a learned craft — one in which we can all improve over time.

We earn the blessing of the Muse by putting in writing time — not by being born with a golden ink pen in our hand.

God’s little hands

The  branches of the tree  reach out like  hands
The hands of children trusting in their need
Beseeching me to notice their demands

On the sea shore, ghosts of children stand
By gasping waves. where  fishing boats made speed
The  branches  bend out like   god’s little hands

In microcosm, in miniature on land
In macrocosm where the planet bleeds
Beseeches us to  answer earth’s demands

The suck of surf, the prayer of shingle sound
Where  rough plants  fill  the shorelines with their seeds
While  branches  reach out like   god’s little hands

Look stranger  at this island, hear its sounds
The sea birds here, the robin in the weeds
Beseeching man to notice their demands

Prayer  is less important, it’s these needs
Demanding ,without bitterness, our deeds
The  branches of the  trees, the golden strands
Tell us, humankind ,their  last demands

 

 

 

I am the earth

It’s frosty and I found my knit wool skirt
It’s purple heather Northern, long and warm
I remember falling down some steps
Stone,they were ,you took me in your arms


With you standing staring on the edge
Oh, Cleveland Hills that make a cliff like fall
We drove the A 19 at deep sunset
The profile of the hills stood out,they called

They ,like Langdale, speak myself to me
My soul awakes with joy to cliffs of sight
Rejoice, oh psalmist, sing your rhapsody
From deep darkness to the morning light

I am the earth, my body will lie here
From Arnside’s Viaduct to Buttermere

New rules for UK residents


1.You must eat exactly one meal a day.This will make you lose weight, stop shopping, save money and wreck the economy.Thin people cough less
2.You must make your phone accessible to the Government. We mean Us. DC and BJ
3.If you commit a crime and are jailed, you will get a meal on alternate days.You may lose weight
So you can slip through the bars!
4.You will wash your undies once a week.Yes, the same pair.Save water, we sold it to Spain
5.Please do not get hunger pings or pangs while in the street or at home
6.If you feel too hungry, you may have a boiled eel on toast cursing you
7.You can be too thin; it is not illegal.
8.You can’t be too rich anymore… the tax man cometh
9.Please sweep your street and eat any pizzas you find
10.Your cat can eat as much as she likes.So you may eat her leftovers
Not the whole tin
11.Do you swear to fix the roof, the whole roof and nothing but the roof?
12.Please do not eat refugees before we count them.Data matters
13.If the pandemic spreads we will put you all in cages.Like in the USA
14.No pretending to be a twin.Not even a tub
15.Lose weight,pray and soon you will be in Heaven.

Wanted: Disguised spies in each street in Britain.No questions in Nothern Ireland
Just take photos.
Pay £7.00 per week plus bonus at Xmas [ £2.00]


Your Government UK

Yet I pray

I feel and fear the emptiness of life
Now that I have grieved as a good wife
No-one wants a holiday with me
Stop the car,I see an ancient tree

The future looms and ends with my own end
What will fill the space, perhaps my friends?
Each day is constructed ,falls to dust
I lie in bed untouched by  husband’s lust

My senses heightened by anxiety
I memorize the details  that I see.
The old man smiling , kissing my  cold  hand
We remembered Norfolk cliffs in coloured bands

When  he flew, he pulled my heart away
Now my breast is empty  yet I pray

Religion is good manners

By Katherine 2013 digital art

Be polite and do not kill your friend

Share your food with others every day

Do not gossip,spite is not profound

Share your sorrows and let comfort stay

Treat the poor respectfully and well

Do not steal a woman with a gun

The poor live close to God so there be still

Do not cause ill feelings hating men

It’s all about good manners I perceive

Do not spoil our sojourn with your greed

The walking frame and the smile

I saw you struggling with your walking frame
Guessed that you must suffer too much pain
I smiled because you caught my sidewards glance
Then  your face too by  smiling was enhanced

So  often older people are ignored
Lost and lonely hidden at the core
Once this man  fought in a  major war
I hope by some fine friend he was  restored

I saw him disappearing  down the  road
His posture more erect,  his back less bowed
And in my heart I felt the smiling too
 Enchanted by the essence , by the cue.

I got on a bus,  ignored my phone,
Smiling   still I  pushed the door key home

Higher Education

I wanted to buy a light weight jacket.I would like it in Unnatural I told them boldly

We don’t do that colour

Well you do Natural!.Every thesis has an opposite one.So with colours

This is not a University, Mrs Hegel

Why tell me that?

You know toi much logic

I am terribly sorry.I shall try to forget it.Along with Grammar

Spelling Thinking Sanity Argument Maths Literary Criticism Theology Philosophy

Wittgenstein Einstein Hegel

Wow I feel sorry for you.You have so much to forget

That’s a novel way of looking at

Education

And it costs so much too

Is

Struggling on life’s craggy slopes

 

Living life in all its fierceness,
Birth and death and joy and pain
We struggle on our unknown journey,
Sometimes lost and found again.

We are indeed like lambs to slaughter
Death will be our final goal.
But while we live,let us live bravely.
Let us not destroy our souls.

Climbing in the hills and moorlands
In the heather, children play.
The sun half blinds me with its light
Yet still I see the given way.

I received a call to climb.
These hills are my essential home.
My vocation is to dwell here
While in the silence,mind may roam.

Noise in cities is destructive.
Though nature's fierce,it's also true.
Struggling on life's craggy slopes
I offer up my words to you.

The strange river

Photo by Katherine

The water ripples in the early sun

The full dark river hurries to the sea

As secretive as an en-cloistered nun

As powerful as s tiger on the run

As poisonous as a snake out having fun

As other as a stranger is to me

As heavy as a heart when love won’t come

The river in flood

Cold from storming rain and full of mud

The river Lea in winter turns to flood

Across the Abbey Meadows rings the bell

Brings back the ghosts, bring back the holy spell

King Harald lost his crown and all his land

The Norman Vikings, men with bloody hands

The life boat crew

The life boat crew are safely home
They’ve brought the shipwrecked sailors too.
The storm has passed, the wind has dropped
The sea is swaying softly now.

Wrapped in soft night clothes, their offspring
Are all in world of dream still lost.
Their fathers’ safely home this time.
They save wrecked ships despite the cost.

Will any lifeboat crew be there
To help less blessed ones from despair,
And lives, too many , spent in care
No fathers and no mothers near?

The sea we certainly must fear,
But more we fear the acts of those
Who try to buy our minds and wills,
For votes in the election booths.

Oh hush my baby, go to sleep,
It is your mammy’s job to weep.
I wish I knew just what to do
To empower the lives of wains like you.

Sleep well, sleep well, my little child.
The sun will rise, the air is mild.
We’ll trust that when we all set sail
Our love and courage will not fail.

Oh,hush my sweet one, I am near.
The world’s too big for bairns to bear.
We’ll do much better this time round.
We’ll not let this boat run aground.

And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?

26233478_1054089244730953_3622257819011378810_o

When true love’s gone and doom hangs over head
When life runs like a river to the sea
Then shall I take new lovers to my bed.
And with their carnal touch consoled be?

When my love lies and break my woman’s heart
. When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path
. Then, shall I my life of evil start
And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?

When true loves lie and wreck all loyalty.
When puzzlement makes all the world seem mad.
Then I shall upend causality
And let myself do deeds which make me glad.

For I have love’s own child inside my soul
And I shall tend her till at last she’s whole

No breeze

How sad it is to see dried river beds

The clouds no longer weep my love is dead

The water does not flow, there is no breeze

The leaves have fallen from the summer trees

Goose

Disoriented, lost,the wild goose flew

Seeking for its mate which lately died.

As if it never saw ànd never knew

The mourning song of doves is not a lie

So birds and other creatures share our pain

Hoping that the lost will soon return

Yet this is final, none will come again.

Unless we day dream, till we lose our way

Believing our own fantasies, we pay

And so our heart will freeze or it will burn.

Soil

I am feeling for the many roots that curve beneath the soil

Where insects scuttle silently, where kindly beetles toil.

Roots keep huge trees from falling down,an anchor and a friend

They feed the trees and crops and flowers in spring when life expands.

I place my feelers out to learn

what other life forms know.

Everywhere the mind can think

imagination goes

Photo by Jill Burrow on Pexels.com

Soup

Photo by Tobias Bju00f8rkli on Pexels.com

The parsnip soup was delicate yet strong..

Here the flavour lingers on my tongue

We had chopped fruit and ice cream in a tub

All I need is he whom I still love.

I need to be caressed but not too much

I shall beat off strangers with a crutch

For women are no longer victims of strong men

Hear my words and write them with a pen

Too literal?

Keep safe,,….. Kill yourself now

Lost your head? You are better off without it.

Don’t believe me ?

He is that loseth his life shall save it. Jesus

Let go and relax.Die of starvation.Free to all in the Third World Claim it now

Force

Denial worked for you for many years
When you nearly crashed when turning right
You give no hint that you had any fear
Denial worked for you for many years
Real though is the body,real the tears
As I sat beside you,well prepared
Your smile was not imagined,nor the light
Denial worked for you for many years
Once you nearly crashed, that was not right

When we turn our face the other way
The roving car will hit us with its force
No time for any thought,much less a prayer
When we turn our face the other way
We will feel the impact or we die
No new day will dawn for those who care
When their eyes are red, their voices hoarse
When we turn our face the other way
The speeding car will hit us with its force