https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/poem-richard-wilbur-black-birch-winter/672580/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/75e23648-8479-11ed-bb21-8f4d97ec7b02?shareToken=6c27b8b2c36ca44e21266f9c061f48ed

Patient 82 should be dead. At the age of 63 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In most cases, he would not have lasted a year. But seven years on, patient 82 is alive. Not merely alive — thriving.Patient 82 should be dead. At the age of 63 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In most cases, he would not have lasted a year. But seven years on, patient 82 is alive. Not merely alive — thriving.

https://www.therapysummit.com/article/wilfred-bion-and-the-importance-of-not-knowing-part-1/

The image is a common one: a child crying due to some unseen force. The mother enters and, through words or touch, soothes the child to the point that he ceases to cry and goes on being. What happened here? Sometimes the child will be soothed without even the slightest touch from the mother (no changing of a diaper or offering of the breast), and yet something material has changed within the baby. For Bion, what happened is that the child’s experience was contained by the mother (Szykierski, 2010). The child has not yet been able to put his experience into thoughts for himself, and has therefore used the mother’s thinking ability to make his experience more palatable. Bion believed that, through the mother’s presence and reverie (which is to say, her ability to perceive what is going on for the child), she can take in the child’s experience, use her mental capacity to digest the child’s intolerable experience, and give it back to the child in a form that he can now tolerate. The mother has now contained the child’s experience (Brown, 2012). The child is then left in a much more manageable state

D

We sense the sacred in these peaceful walls
Yet men have died in places that appal
Women too and children then unborn
Fell into cold dark earth in lands forlorn

As our weapons grow, our hearts are hard
The people live in Gaza behind bars
The water all polluted as taps drip
Is this war or is it vengeance fit?

In Britain, it’s the poor who lose the war
As it was when Jesus Mary bore
Yet here are clerics blessing marching bands
A military show for all the land

The genocide in Europe of the Jews
The self destructive actions of the proud
The fields of France filled sick with blood and bone
Who are we to cast judgemental stones?

The War’s not over when the fighting stops
The soldiers and the tortured suffer shock
The widows and the parents all bereaved.
The unborn children hover in unease

We let the prisoners out from camps of death
But who would take them in or take their path?
The injuries will travel down the years
As still we fight and still we live in fear

It’s Europe’s grasp and greed which was the cause
Of death in Gaza, Syria, in long wars
Yet we judge we are more civilised
When we self defend with bitter lies

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry

This lady died shortly after a staff member open her door and shone light on her face to see if she was alive. The shock killed her

I went into the North Middlesex hospital suffering from severe back pain. I came out with severe paranoia unless the nurse. was really trying to kill me.

Woke up at 1:30 a.m. and could not make where I was. So I rang the police with my mobile they tell me I was in the hospital. They said talk to one of the nurses. I said I prefer the doctor. They said I should ring the dating agency.. It’s just amazing what you have to do now to see a doctor in the United Kingdom

They tell me my kidneys were bleeding when I went in and they were still bleeding when I went out. You see I went in with concussion. I used to think that meant a head injury.

What they call a killer smile  needs cold eyes. I’m afraid you will be no good for the job. Why not watch Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston?

From your photograph I can say you are either extremely intelligent or suffering from prolonged and se vere panic. So we have decided to offer you the job as either of these will be an asset to a psychiatrist. You have both so you are perfect.

I wonder if Hitler ever had a panic attack

This man murdered someone just  to prove he is a strong person. Shooting someone who just fallen off their bicycle revealed a serious lack of empathy. Even if it’s his bicycle that’s no excuse for shooting somebody. A kick would have been excusable if this man was a thief but even that is illegal unless the cyclist was carrying feed to a starving familyv in which case the Catholic church says it is not a sin.

They should know. Have you seen how small the hosts are now when you go to communion? Couldn’t Jesus be equally at Home in a sandwich?

I know that they didn’t have sandwiches at The Last Supper but does that mean that nobody can eat them anymore? Are you thinking of all the work involved in sweeping the floor afterwards? It is a very large church. Maybe we need to buy a vacuum cleaner.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/29/conversation-mental-health-psychiatric-language-seriously-ill?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

For each symptom, we vary in terms of how often we experience it, how severe it is, how easily we can control it, and how much distress it causes. In the terrain of mental health, there is no objective border to cross that delineates the territory of disorder. On top of this, the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that appear temporarily as a natural response to hardship and stress – like when we’re heartbroken – exactly mimic those that, should they persist, are defining features of mental disorders. So blurry are these boundaries that some psychologists argue we shouldn’t use the terms “illness” or “disorder” at all, and should only view all of this as matters of degree.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/25/the-vale-of-soul-making/

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/07/25/the-vale-of-soul-making/

“I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” Keats

https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/63097/dalrev_vol61_iss1_pp39_51.pdf?sequence=1

“When we look into Keats’s expressions of conflict between
imagination and reality we can see the roots of this conflict in the
problem of identity. Keats wrote about the sunset, the sparrow, the
mythological figure as if he had lost his identity in the object. He
experienced these identifications sometimes with a sense of discovery
and sometimes with fear or irritability. Eventually, Keats began to see
that his identity would not be maddened by his imagination and could
be strengthened by it. He realized, in other words, “that a not inconsiderable increase in psychical efficiency” can result “from a disposition
which in itself is perilous.” In-the four years we know Keats as a letter
writer and a poet, we can see the development of his capacity for
retaining a sense of identity even when seized by powerful or seductive
visions. This is the development–the turning of a weakness into a
strength, both as artist and as man-that accounts for many apparent
contradictions in Keats’s thought. The language of negative capability
has been difficult because it suggests a puzzling oxymoron- a negative
and a positive. The figure presents two aspects of a dual process, the
first part of which, in its partial renunciation of control, can be felt as a
negative, while the second, or alternating, state recreates and is felt as a
capability. The c reative process in some of its operations posed
dangers for Keats’!; identity. But by the spring of 1819, the period of the
great odes, there appears a new strength in the second aspect of
negative capabilily imagination”

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-unintended-reformation/

I’d like to lie beside you,
so we’d be face to face.
Then we could at last enjoy
A sweet visual embrace.

Eye to eye,
I look at you.
Beloved face is
in my view.

Then I take my fingers
way across your brow;
my fingers linger on your lips-
somewhere,somehow.

.
I trace these dear lines of old age
which wander round your eyes.
I run my fingers down your nose.
My touch is satisfied.

I’d like to trace your smiling lips.
That look so fine and strong.
With my own pink finger tips.
Would you think me wrong?

Your powerful arms enclose me
And I hug your shoulders now.
I’ll rub you down with fragrant cream
From your toes up to your brow.

I’d like to boil your hankies
In an ancient pan
On a big coal fire..
Though the coal fires are long gone.

I’d like to rest my curly head
Upon your bony chest
I’ll test your antiperspirant
And the whiteness of your vest.

I’ll treat you very tenderly
and keep you free of dirt
For as they used to say one time:
Oh,how real loving hurts!

I lie back in this weather-proofed green chair
To gaze up at the flowering maple tree.
Now,touched by sun,my lungs full of fresh air
I embrace with joy the beauty I now see.

Old celandine flash brightly by my feet
Neglected currants straggle round the path
There is no birdsong yet a silence sweet
Soothes my heart and quietens my wrath.

Formy heart's sore and anguished is my mind
Yet in this little wood I feel deep calm.
My eyes are shadowed and my face is lined.
May this green spring bring me a gentle balm.

For even in depression and deep grief,
The mind makes healing medicine of a leaf.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/28/bereavement-often-takes-our-sense-of-self-but-it-can-be-regained?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/how-finding-balance-helped-a-father-support-his-troubled-daughter?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Thank you for your email I’m afraid I’m on holiday at the moment. I will not be at home ma for 3 weeks

My address is 93 Magic Rd Tottenham Edinburgh 31. there is a door key hang8ng from string just inside the letterbox .

Please steal my vacuum cleaner. I don’t like it so if you take it I can claim on my insurance and get a new one please don’t steal anything else because I have locked my gold and diamonds in the freezer for safekeeping and I don’t want you to open the door in case you don’t shut it properly.

If you need help with your work please contact your line manager as soon as possible I can’t be bothered to do anything.

Katherine villanelle  

In the dark street with its glaring lights
Deserted pavements, cars that multiply
I see two of everything in sight

Twenty dogs two owls that fly by night
Two black cats  with amber eyes run by
In the dark street with its glaring lights

As I walk I sing  to cats’ delight
I sing Joan of Arc,I wonder why
I see two of everything in sight

The song takes seven minutes,or it might
If I sang like Leonard ,  if I sighed
In the dark street with its glaring lights

No-one can detect my wandering sight
Yet now and then I wail or emit cries
I see  more than you do with insight

These little deaths mount up as our time flies
In  the end we step with shuttered eyes
In the dark street with its errant lights
I see two of everything in sig

Viburnum fragrans

Pink flowers on bare wood in winter

The contrast exaggerates both

The delicate flower and the pale wintry wood

The stern branches can bear the winter winds.

Small birds must hide in the laurel

Later the wood pigeons will nest there

The cat hides under the beech hedge by the wall.

I never wanted a red brick wall but it’s warm.

The sharp frosts torture the ground

The seeds split and divide

I didn’t know that when I was a child

Where the air raid shelter used to be we had some soil

And in that we planted a tree.

When we sold the house we took the tree.

I can’t believe that now

The seeds split and start to grow

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/16/amy-bloom-nigella-lawson-is-god-if-were-lucky?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://poets.org/poem/memoriam-ring-out-wild-bells