Category: Thinkings and poems
Arched like a fallen moon
Old man,bending over,
arched like a fallen moon
in a dark lilac November sky.
joy and pain wrestle my heart across the emptiness
and toss it up like a damp rocket
to fall in a hidden corner where mice live.
Would that not be a good ending,to be dust
to these little creatures nesting
in my chewed green twine and my tartan basket?
They have eyes and shiver in my hand when I rescue them
from the cat…
as any heart might.
Now night falls on the newspaper basket
where the damp Times and the Guardian mix into glue
and tomorrow the sun will rise
and it will just be the garbage
with no poetic undertones nor deathly hushes..
Heather and a silver light
you stand on a hill top like a god
looking over his domain.
Strong and now weak
it’s the human condition
Everlasting life is too dangerous for us.
Silent,motionless,home of beetles
bit by bit we fall away
into the mother soil
with cracked jugs and dropped coins
for a future academic to dig into.
Transparent the hand that touches me.
Whose might it be?
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An historic performance
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How are we affected by the loss of many people killed in WW2,and by Stalin and by Hitler ,including the Holocaust? And how did the Church respond?
It is estimated Hitler killed 12 million people,half were European Jews.Stalin is estimated at 7 million.Such numbers are hard to imagine.Especially to feel each one was a unique person like ourself is to us and our loved ones are to us.These were unique ,beloved people.
Surely Christianity itself has died along with the innocent ?
What I have been thinking recently is: how different is the world and especially Europe is .since we lost so many people and hence lost their descendants? Jewish people were almost wiped out and I believe Yiddish is not spoken now.Yet Jews are usually said to be very intelligent [ like Nobel Prize Awards are much higher in proportion ]
Is it possible to grieve such enormous losses? Nobody knows.We lost then but we lost our own selves as well/Who are we now after such murder?
I wonder , if we include the soldiers killed. in battle , whether Europe has lost out genetically.That is my thinking on wondering why we have so few admirable politicians and other leaders.It doesn’t explain Donald Trump except he is half German.His family must have left before WW1.I am unsure why so many Germans went to the USA.Possibly to escape rigid European work/class problems and hope for more freedom.Nobody quite like that exists here, thank God.
I have read that some people think Judaism was wrecked as a religion by the Holocaust but I hope that is not true.But belief in God is tested by immense tragedies.And modern life, in general ,has little time for any religion.
I wonder if to the folk who run the world it is a like a big game and we are their toy soldiers.Dispensible.
Vengeance is mine,says the Lord.Where is he?Why is he waiting?
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Like a fox hides in a hole or den
I have been acquainted well with grief
I have wept at home and wept abroad.
I have lost my loved ones to this thief.
I have known grief spread like rivers wide
I ‘ve been hurt by painful ,wracked tears
I have felt the absence of my God.
I’ve known grief for more than sixty years
My father and his brother were the first
I have met no being who’s been spared.
Yet we have no permission here to weep
I long for ritual like a writer needs a pen
I long to dream of them while I’m asleep.
Like a fox hides in a hole or den
I would like to hide when days begin
Uncontained by his love again
As a tree mourns for each little leaf
As God mourns for Adam’s holy sin
I have been acquainted with harsh grief
I have seen each ghost and I believe.
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A turn up for the books
Harry Heber with his parents and sister. He arrived in the UK in December 1938 on the Harwich ferry. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
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How is the world,now emptied of your being?
In fields of lushest buttercups we ‘d lie
We’d watch the clouds as gently they blew by.
Love was born we thought would never die.
But now you’re gone, and so I sadly sigh
That love itself remains without your form
Yet tears of loss enfold me like a storm.
I knew you’d never hurt or do me harm.
I felt your smile’s embrace, so wide, so warm.
How is the world,now emptied of your being?
No sound,no touch,no smell,no sight,no seeing.
How is the world when you have gone ahead
Yet I must linger in this empty bed?
Yet those who love are grateful for this gift
Our sorrow is that life itself’s too swift
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Come live with me
Come live with me and be my helpmeet now
I’ll share my only bed with you and how!
If you let me love you
I’ll darn your old wool gloves 4 you..
If you come and meet me brow to brow.
Come live with me ‘n teach me all you know
About poetic licence and Defoe.
I’ll mend your vacuum cleaner,
learn expressions meaner..
How cheerfully the hours to come will go,
Come live with me and be my lover true
Without one,however shall we do?
I’ll set up England’s railways
And learn the Chinese weekdays
Come live with me and I will sweep your flue.
Come live with me in Norway on a fjord
I’ll use my Canon powershot even more.
I’ll watch the flowers growing
And see the waters flowing
How happy Wittgenstein’d be if he’d knowed.
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Green?
I know why shyness make one blush bright red .It’s to make people steer clear but why does envy make one green?Is it a metaphor as it’s sickness that usually makes one go green.Envy may be sickness.Is that it?
I went white all over when he rejected me.I looked as if I was dyed
She has the blues but it’s not obvious unless you know her really well.Like if she cuts her finger.I blame Edward the 7th.He’s dead, you see.
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Our language problems
Keep your sentences pithy with a full stop.Do not fall into it.
He has to have a semi-colon investigation soon.Is it the period or the comma, we may ask.
She has been in a comma for years.It’s a miracle she’s not read as yet.
He came to a full stop by the British Museum.He wants to end it there.I am distraught as I was mistaught.It was not a real sentence.No verb.
I said he was in the para-military,not he’s got a paragraph on the Mirror.They don’t know what a paragraph is and neither do I. In fact I could write enough about it to fill a third of this page.But don’t worry,I shan’t.So there!
Comma here,my darling.I have room for two ,,
Don’t reply to me,imaginary data.Exclaim please!!!!
When do you use a colon, the teacher asked?
The boy responded:after our food is digested, until we can evacuate the remains of the prey.
Why has the whole industry come to a full stop? It’s a cliche.Let’s start it up again.There’s more in this than meets the spy.
At the end os his sentences he always drew a full stop.Well, he was an artist ionce.,so he thought but he was autistic, though on a bend in the spectrum.Or was it blend?
As I entered the room I saw a question mark hanging over Mr Smith’s bed.He likes to play puzzles in the night.His wife wants a divorce on the grounds of punctuation games interfering with her sex life.When she looks up. her whole life passes before her.How would you like that?
It depends on the life!
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When to use a semi-colon
http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/semicolons.asp
Even Oxford educated people can forget the rules of grammar,just like nearly everyone else in the UK.In fact, if you are too good at grammar it might make you bad at it in a very real sense, at this moment in time.I hope you can grasp what I write and use it for something or other,like, er,what d’you call it?
Extract
It’s no accident that a semicolon is a period atop a comma. Like commas, semicolons indicate an audible pause—slightly longer than a comma’s, but short of a period’s full stop.
Semicolons have other functions, too. But first, a caveat: avoid the common mistake of using a semicolon to replace a colon (see the “Colons” section).
Incorrect: I have one goal; to find her.
Correct: I have one goal: to find her.
Rule 1a. A semicolon can replace a period if the writer wishes to narrow the gap between two closely linked sentences.
Examples:
Call me tomorrow; you can give me an answer then.
We have paid our dues; we expect all the privileges listed in the contract.
Rule 1b. Avoid a semicolon when a dependent clause comes before an independent clause.
Incorrect: Although they tried; they failed.
Correct: Although they tried, they failed.
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Jane Smiley, the novelist
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6402/the-art-of-fiction-no-229-jane-smiley
“Do you know the writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? He’s a Hungarian psychologist who writes about the state of flow. If you’re in a creative state, then essentially things sort of coagulate and you enter a state of hyperconsciousness—you can write for an hour or so, but it only seems like a few minutes because you’re so concentrated on it. I’ve experienced that a lot, which doesn’t mean there’s no frustration, but I don’t really remember the frustration very well. I remember more when the writing comes together. And I’m willing to seek out that coming together. If I get frustrated, I’ll go eat something, I’ll go open another Diet Coke, I’ll go the barn, I’ll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea. I read an article about how to learn to play a musical instrument. You practice, practice, practice on Friday, then you walk away. And then when you sit down on Saturday, you’re better. Not only because of all the practice, but also because of the walking away. I’m a firm believer in walking away. ”
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Acquainted with the Night
BY ROBERT FROST
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
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Don’t fall in
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Spirit lost in wars,what is our aim?
I feel this needs improvement but so far I have not managed it
In the past, we thought the world our own
Created for us by a loving Lord
So on its lands , we made our little homes
Existentialists claim we have no home
Dislocated,life can’t be enjoyed
In the past, folk felt the world their own
Hell is other people, Sartre claimed,
Dividing us to monads ,deeply flawed
Yet in the past ,community was sane
Why do we feel lost with lone hearts maimed?
Are we shocked by new techniques and awe?
In the past, communion was our own
Spirit lost in wars,what is our aim?
If God is dead, who shall declaim the Law?
We’re ” civilised “, how mute Ethics forlorn
The tablet Moses found has been disdained
We submit to nothing but our toys.
Machines and war destroy communal aims.
Who can raise us ;how can debts be paid?
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Autumn Sky BY CHARLES SIMIC
In my great grandmother’s time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
•
The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
•
Oh Cynthia,
Take a clock that has lost its hands
For a ride.
Get me a room at Hotel Eternity
Where Time likes to stop now and then.
•
Come, lovers of dark corners,
The sky says,
And sit in one of my dark corners.
There are tasty little zeroes
In the peanut dish tonight.
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Dwell on things or let them go?
Do we have a choice?
Sometimes we have to reflect.But it can turn into rumination which is linked to much mental suffering and even illness.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24444431
Extract:
“We found that people who didn’t ruminate or blame themselves for their difficulties had much lower levels of depression and anxiety, even if they’d experienced many negative events in their lives,” says Peter Kinderman, who led the study and is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool.”Dwelling on negative thoughts and self blame have previously been recognised as important when it comes to mental health, but not to the extent this study has shown.
“The findings suggest both are crucial psychological pathways to depression and anxiety”
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Charles Simic and his writing
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/charles-simic
Some of Simic’s best-known works challenge the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary. He animates and gives substance to inanimate objects, discerning the strangeness in household items as ordinary as a knife or a spoon. Robert Shaw wrote in the New Republic that the most striking perception of the author’s early poems was that “inanimate objects pursue a life of their own and present, at times, a dark parody of human existence.” Childhood experiences of war, poverty, and hunger also lie behind a number of poems. In the Georgia Review, Peter Stitt claimed that Simic’s most persistent concern “is with the effect of cruel political structures upon ordinary human life….The world of Simic’s poems is frightening, mysterious, hostile, dangerous.” However, Stitt noted, Simic tempers this perception of horror with gallows humor and an ironic self-awareness: “Even the most somber poems … exhibit a liveliness of style and imagination that seems to re-create, before our eyes, the possibility of light upon the earth. Perhaps a better way of expressing this would be to say that Simic counters the darkness of political structures with the sanctifying light of art.”
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Why Charles Simic still writes poetry
Photo by Deirdre W..Copyright
” My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going. I now regret destroying my early poems, because I no longer remember whom they were modeled after. At the time I wrote them, I was reading mostly fiction and had little knowledge of contemporary poetry and modernist poets. The only extensive exposure I had to poetry was in the year I attended school in Paris before coming to the United States. They not only had us read Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, but they made us memorize certain poems of theirs and recite them in front of the class. This was such a nightmare for me as a rudimentary speaker of French—and guaranteed fun for my classmates, who cracked up at the way I mispronounced some of the most beautiful and justly famous lines of poetry in French literature—that for years afterwards I couldn’t bring myself to take stock of what I learned in that class. Today, it’s clear to me that my love of poetry comes from those readings and those recitations, which left a deeper impact on me than I realized when I was young”
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Just the one
Even now I can’t accept you’re gone.
When I wake it hits me hard again.
I’ll never love another,you’re the one.
I’ll never have a man to lean upon
They invite me, but I say I dinna ken.
Even now I can’t accept you’re gone.
I daydream of others but have none
I imagine meeting someone by Big Ben
But I’ll never love another,you’re the one.
Some days are lonely for folk shun
The widow and the orphan as unclean
Even now they won’t accept you’re gone.
Maybe I’m too dogmatic,saying none.
Believing that by many I’m unseen
Can I ever love another, even one?
I’d like a man who loves some jokes and fun.
But how to start, to finish or begin?
Even though I can’t accept you’re gone,
I may love another,just the one.
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The first bird
And thinking too,by Love’s despised
Your face is map enough for me
Your gaze,your smile,your frown,your glee.
And if I want to know the rest
The shape your posture’s made is best
For showing what your life is now.
A look,a gesture,all this show.
Till all you are is then disclosed
And I am in your arms enrobed.
Love vanishes when analysed,
And thinking too’ by Love’s despised
Use the means to fit the end
And then I’ll be what you intend.
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Short story writing
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Humorous post on rules for writing
Your rules for writing
I thought in neither ribaldry nor play
I caught those ten fried rhymes on dying ebb And so I would not jump nor fight today. But then I thought of Adam’s folding rib, And how the hard enjoy a lady's fry I believed scored rhymes were left for dead. My incompetence was on its languorous bed. But then we felt old fleas that bit us good And lo I sought to buy piss off the web. I thought no bird could ever click its beak And so I fell into a writer’s wok Bad eyesight made the grilling chickens leap While I prised the deadheads off the crocks. I thought I’d incite ribaldry or play Dutch cows I love, and I am thrilled by hay.
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How not to talk about your problems
Talking makes it worse
Should we learn another language?
If I learn another language, should it be
A language made of words and history
Should I start with what is basic?
Will they tell me how to phrase it?
I’m afraid of sounding like a Pharisee.
Should I learn the body’s special language first
Without that will my French sound even worse?
The vocabulary’s not sufficient
If our movements are deficient
It’s dancing with the sentences, each blessed.
We can’t separate a language into parts
If we want to speak or write with all our heart.
Non-verbal skill proficient
Makes up for what’s deficient
As our meaning crosses over like a dart.
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Animals do not read Dr Spock
Worms and frogs and beetles need no clock
Human beings learn to tell the time
Animals do not read Dr Spock
Worms and frogs and beetles need no clock
Neither have they doors which need a lock
They communicate without a word or rhyme
Worms and frogs and beetles need no clock
Human beings learn to tell the time
Did we once feel natural like the beasts
Who follow sun and moon and unknown signs
In winter sheep will grow a thicker fleece
Did we once feel natural like the beasts
Who need not worry that their clothes are creased.
Who have to wear the coat Nature’s designs?
Did we once feel natural like the beasts
Who follow sun and moon and unknown signs?
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British Summer time ends in two days
This day is warm and balmy like mid-June
Though British Summer time ends in two days
So dark will be our evenings very soon
Today is warm and balmy like hot June
Alas the summer flowers are not in bloom
In damp earth, the worms and beetles play.
Today is warm and balmy like mid-June
Though British Summer time ends in two days
