Mary opened the door as the bell kept ringing.There stood a clergyman in a grey wool suit and baseball cap coordinated with his Nike trainers
Hello,madam,he said suavely in a mellifluous voice
Hello,Mary answered kindly.What is your mission?
To convert the entire world to Christianity.
I am sorry,I meant what was your mission with me.But anyway, you can’t convert me.So you are a failure.It’s called a counter example in Maths.
Why can’t I convert you, he asked the blue eyed witch of Knittingham standing there in her dark Artigiano jeans, Dash striped top and a red wool stole
I like choice, she cried.I do not want a creed.
Anyway, the man told her,I just came to say I am buying a flat across the road and I wanted some opinions on the quietness of this area before I finalise my purchase.
Mioaw,went Emile in a loud shriek
Oh,Lord, what is that, a demon,the poor man asked?
It’s only my cat, she told him,why not come in for coffee and I’ll tell you about the nearest neighbours.
That is very kind of you, he said.But I might be a burglar
Oh,good,Emile purred.I’ve always wanted to meet a burglar.
Why, asked the man as he entered the beautiful hall full of spiders and Picasso prints.
You can tell me how I can get into other people’s houses, the cat told him boldly.
I want to be a cat burglar!
Come into the living room, said Mary.The room was full of books like the Encarta English Dictionary, Stanley Middleton and “How to talk so cats can hear” piled in tidy heaps.
My name is Jacob, the visitor said.I have just retired but am keen to keep converting people as Christianity is the best religion ever
I don’t really want a religion and I am unsure how you prove it’s the best
I am keener on the Hindu religion, she lied impertinently just to see if she could carry it off as Aspies can’t tell lies
Suddenly the kitchen door opened and in ran Annie, the neighbour and one time Mistress of Stan,Mary’s late and dangerous old husband
Hello,Jake, she cried as she kissed his aged cheeks fondly
I am buying a flat but I didn’t know you lived here he said politely
We met on Tinder, Annie told Mary.
What is that, a hill? I know Kinder Scout.
It’s a dating website,Annie said gently, her curving lips covered in wine coloured lip glaze which almost matched her burgundy eye shadow and purple hair.
Why did you not ask me? Mary said shyly
I didn’t think you wanted another man,Annie said pertly with a twinkle in her gorgeous red eyes.
And Jacob said he came to convert me but is it true?
No, said Jacob.I saw you in the front garden and you look so beautiful I wanted to meet you.
Thank God you are not going to shower me with Biblical quotes,Mary said.
I suppose we should admire you going straight for what you want.Although when you know me better you may not find me so attractive.
Jake’s eyes bulged with emotion.
Well, you may not find me so attractive either, he cried wiping his streaming eyes on a kleenex tissue.
Mary ran upstairs and collected Stan’s hankies
Here, use these, she told Jake soulfully
Annie brought in some hot coffee with cream
What do we older people want, she murmured quizzically.We have loved and lost but shall we love again?
Well, I shall mioawed Emile.I don’t keep thinking,I just do it.If I get a chance
Love is more than sex,Emile.We want someone who shares a few interests and likes conversation.
What are your interests, she asked Jake?
I can’t remember, he admitted.I’ll have to look on FB at my profile.
But what do you do all day?
I read the Guardian and the Independent then I go out looking for women.
Women of the Night?
No,I just like to sit in the Mall and admire women as they pass by.I don’t want to cause suffering to women.And I am diabetic so I get erectile dysfunction sometimes so it would be a waste of money in any case
Well, if there was a National Wage or better benefits these prostitutes might give up their dangerous work.They all sat looking glum as they pondered over the political scene in Britain
If we were Jews we could live in Israel
Yes, you’d have seriously think of that to as the number of anti Semitic hate crimes has gone up by about 70% this year.And what that has to do with Brexit is hard to know except all people who are of different ethnicity are also being attacked.Some people seem to think it means black people will have to leave despite the fact nowhere in Europe is there a country mainly made up of black people.And during the Empire all people in it were British citizens.
Still,I feel too old to convert.Can we get false documents to prove we are Jewish?
That’s not something I know about, said Jacob, though my name is Jewish.It is Disraeli!
Hang on a minute,cried Annie.Let’s not be too hasty.It looks like Israel is on the verge of war.Yet Jake. if you married both of us we could get in as your wives as you must be Jewish.
But we are not meant to marry Gentiles.
Well how about us being servants?
Alas, that country was never truly accepted and it has become very,very fierce.I find as well that they love arguing ,which I don’t said Mary.
Well many other people love arguing,Jake said.But it’s true it is dangerous there especially with Syria at war so nearby
Why don’t we all go out and have a salt beef sandwich and some chips instead?Or how about ringing 999 for advice? They will know about getting false passports.
Is that true,said Mary
And so ask all of us.

Distracting thoughts harass my heart and mind.

Like gnats that dance on ponds in bright sunshine

In the deeper waters there are fish.

How to tempt them to my little dish?

The gossips have no wisdom, they are fools.

Idle thoughts are idle, they misrule

Do not converse with your own idle thoughts

Wait in peace for wisdom has a heart

Gossip has a function in a street.

Gives us bored old folk sweet meats.

Do not introduce your careless hate.

As ,hidden in the Shadows, Satan waits

Quietly drowning in the rivers deep

The inner guide will help you dream to sleep.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/20/grief-is-horrible-supposed-to-be-have-to-feel-loss-before-can-grow-through-it?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.madintheuk.com/2020/12/review-of-call-me-crazy-a-play-by-paula-caplan/

Now the white rose decks the holly tree

White candles for the summer time to me

The mother plant has died but left this child

Climbing up the tree presumptuous, wild.

From the window, my astonished eyes

Saw a hundred flowers glow at sunrise

My mother had just died but left me this

The sight  gave me  new joy, a smile,a kiss.

To some this rose would be a weed malign

Strangling a great tree by cruel design

The tree is very strong and very tall

The white rose gleams as sparrows call.

The birds will nest protected by the thorns.

The roses with their fragrance bless the dawn

https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/quotes/page/5/

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,—
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action

There are superficial trends in our society to encourage us to build our self esteem and to value ourselves… to develop and achieve  a place suited to our talents.. but what is best for me is when I lose myself in something.I was reading an old blog of a friend and was quite absorbed and went into a different state of mind..then I regretted I don’t manage to lose myself enoughb have an adult having much on my mind and being busy.

Sometimes it can happen when we love a person.Sometimes a wonderful landscape feels like home.. other times a sunset across the Irish sea from the cliffs of the Isle of Man where myriad butterflies swirl and float over flowers and rocks.

Modern life, the News,talk,excitement of the wrong sort seem to lock us into  our self and frighten us so we forget the value of finding something in which to lose ourselves and grow as a result. Sitting by a river  fishing,knitting,sewing,a book, many things can elicit this response  And remember how horror filled was the self consciousness of adolescence and how good to forget one’s self being more comfortable and accepting of appearance and image..How to live like a wild flower for a time… and be happy not to be a rose but just a tiny wild geranium or a moderate  sized  gentle pink flower in a arden

.

How could you die and leave me all alone.

With a heart that’s cold and hard like a gravestone?.

How could you go before me into dark

Leaving me alone in this world stark?

It was not real until your soul flew out

Your body was still here, there was no doubt.

I sang the Psalms and then I murdered prayer

I pretended wisdom which was not quite there

I felt I had to let you go my dear.

Perfect love does not diminish fear.

I had never felt this pain so deep

The gravestones gaped, the blackbirds seemed to weep.

When I went back home I turned the key

Only my cat Alfred welcomed me

My face was torn in half my body crushed.

No mother’s lullaby, oh baby hush.

My spine has cracked in two, I barely stand.

Was this forevseen,my wedding band?

I took the golden ring and let it go.

Hush my baby hush now,it is so

W

Looking out across the River Lee

I could not see a place where you might be.

Tower blocks high and low stung both my eyes.

What use are sisters when they seem to die?

I could not see the road to take me home

I closed my lips so none might hear me moan

From another window I looked out

I saw a busy road and heard men shout.

The world was empty to my starving eye.

I saw the ice cream clouds as they went by.

The world I once could see was gone,was bare

I could not see your face,not anywhere.

How could you leave me in this desert harsh ?

The river Lea polluted stinks the marsh

There was no place where little birds could rest.

These feelings were a stone inside my chest.

I feel the grief without that blight despair.

And yet to others everything is fair

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-more-closely-related-than-we-commonly-think/

Who’re you? Wittgenstein?
He’s dead
What a shame
Actually would he  enjoy living in England now
No, because he was Jewish.
So are lots of people.
Somehow they get hurt  or even killed at times
What times?
Nazi.times
Stalin-times
Tsar-times
GoodFriday-times
Greedy-times
Allthe-time
In the Times
Of the times
Oh, time!
Well it’s about time we stopped it.
About time
On time
In time
After time
Time and Motion
Soon we’ll have the Flood
Why has Boris not built an Ark?
Because he doesn’t Noah how to
Because God didn’t see him
Because there was a  full stop at the end of the sentence.

He wanted to put her teeth right out of his mind

Ruth Rendell

Out of sight out of mind

Old English adage.

Oh the mind has mountains…

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The mind is deeper than a well and higher than a star

That’s a line from one of my poems I believe.

I tried to put it out of my mind but it refused to budge

I’m in two minds about this job.

Sometimes we need mindless activity.

You must be out of  your mind to think thatm

Keep me in mind.

I thought I’d lost my mind

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/12/06/auden-and-god/

 

““To pray,” Auden wrote, “is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.” This may seem a denatured idea of prayer, but Auden took it seriously, and seems to have prayed in exactly this sense. The only value he found in “petitionary prayer”—prayer that asks for something—was that the act of expressing desires can reveal what they are, so that “we often discover that they are really wishes that two-and-two should make three or five, as when St. Augustine realized that he was praying: ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’” Auden prayed to a God whom he knew he thought about in falsely human-centered terms, but only by doing so could he listen with any attention: “I can see…what leads [Paul] Tillich to speak of God as ‘Ground of Being,’ but if I try to pray: ‘O Thou Ground, have mercy upon us,’ I start to giggle.””

I hought more cyclamen and recalled you
Wandering through wildflowers  by my side
I don’t know where to put them , they might die
Then I would feel so sad and lonely blue
All we read of pain and love is true.
Yet we let our hearts stay open wide
I bought some cyclamen and recalled you
Wandering through wildflowers  by my side
I have loved not widely but a few
I have touched on bliss  and when it flies
I have touched the grief that truly  lies
I bought  cyclamen and recalled you

Do not leave us for your lonely grave

Do not leave us here when you are gone

Do not leave my heart in blood to bathe

We need your kindness your work is not done

Do not leave a sister all alone

Do not leave a brother empty sad.

You who share my skin and share my bones

Come back come back live not with the Dead

Here’s your daughter with her newborn babe

Here’s your eldest son oh mother mine

Live again live again oh stay

Do not leave us yet without a sign

The tears run down our faces but too late.

The human world’s not ours to navigate

I jumped out of my skin when she rang the bell

I was in two minds about what to do after the conference.

I couldn’t make up my mind.

I nearly lost my mind when I was in the hospital I wonder if they keep them the lost property department.

I have no mind for murder

She has taken leave of her senses

You must be out of your mind

I was beside myself in the hospital.

I was hoping for a  bird’s eye view.

His eyes nearly came out of his head

He was there but absent from his body

They hear but they don’t listen

He that has ears to hear let him hear.

She looked right through me.

I was in a brown study so I didn’t hear a thing he said.

Doctor I don’t feel myself at all today.

You don’t seem like the man I am married.

He looked weighed down with guilt

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/evolution-the-self/201410/where-are-you-when-you-re-beside-yourself

https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/examples-body-idioms

From the mangled chaos of the lines
Emerge strange forms and all too telling tales
O life satanic and O loss divine

Faces will make then themselves, define
From the compost and the deathly rail
And the mangled chaos of the lines

There is never reason nor a rhyme
As Jonah found when sucked in by a whale
O life satanic and o loss divine

What is living but a life of crime?
Whether trained in Borstal or at Yale
Feel the mangled chaos of the lines

We wander, having leaders well outgrown
Some days it is hell and we just crawl
O life satanic and o loss divine

I believe, in bitterness and gall,
We must hold our spirits as they fall
Dark the mangled chaos of our lives
O love satanic and O loss divine

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01410-z

Photo by Mike Flemming copyright

 

 

https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RHR_2261_0032–from-reformation-to-renaissance.htm

Extract

Two undeniable facts remain: the Anglican Reformation did not actually lead to any form of poetic engagement nor did it produce the sort of politically inspired poetry that is associated with the French epic poems of Agrippa d’Aubigné.[1]  One of the rare exceptions was a sonnet by Milton “On…[1] It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that the first poems bearing the spiritual influences of the Reformation appeared. This is a result of the transposition whereby England is neither the birthplace nor the promised land of the Reformation, but a significant hub where the continental prototypes were adapted under Anglicanism and subsequently exported in its new idiosyncratic form to the New World, the chosen land of the Puritans. A complete overview of the subject would also include the Puritan literature of New England,[2]  See Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans. Their…[2] but this would merely highlight the rarity of poetry amongst a generation of pragmatic colonists, who were far more preoccupied with establishing permanent settlements than making an epic gesture that would aggrandize them in the eyes of all posterity.

6

However, back in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century, poetry was undergoing a reformation. The long reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) was conducive to political stability, to the flourishing of the arts, and a literature enriched by court poets such as Philip Sydney (1554–1586) and Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), who embroidered versions around the myth of the Virgin Queen that were both epic (The Faerie Queene, 1590–1599) and pastoral (Arcadia, 1590). At court there was a throng of fine and erudite minds whose rhetorical education drew not only on the Greco-Roman culture brought back into favor by the humanists, but also on the Bible, the core text for the schools of rhetoric based on the reformation of knowledge initiated by John Colet (1466–1519, a friend of Erasmus and Thomas More, and founder of St. Paul’s School in London). Many of these poets were no longer alive when the translation of the King James Bible was published in 1611 (Sydney died in 1586, Spenser in 1599). Nevertheless, as humanists, the poets were highly knowledgeable and were able to translate, gloss, or imitate the Psalms without fail.

7

By the time the great metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw) provided spirituality in English poetry, with its real momentum during the first years of the seventeenth century, these rhetorical exercises around the Psalms had already become great classics, thus allowing a young poet to shape his style through his juvenilia, before embarking on original creative works. Thus, the English were initiated at the same school as Racan, Corneille, and Racine, or again Gryphius and Angelus Silesius. In addition to Sydney, it is worth noting: the Scotsman and Lutheran George Buchanan (1506–1582), author of a Latin Paraphrase of all the Psalms (written in 1566), a work which was re-published twenty-six times in the course of one hundred and fifty years; the court poet Thomas Carew (1594–1640) who wrote his paraphrases in English; and the sacred epigrams rendered in Latin by two metaphysical poets, the Anglican George Herbert (1593–1633: Passio Discerpta – Rendings from the Passion, and Lucus – the Sacred Grove) and the Puritan-born Catholic Richard Crashaw (1612–1649, Epigrammatum Liber, 1634). All these examples are in fact more interesting from a linguistic rather than a stylistic point of view in that they are the last remnants of neo-Latin[3]  See Pierre Laurens and Claudie Balavoine, ed., Musae…[3] literature of English origin. Having left these schoolboy exercises behind, a seventeenth century English poet would henceforth write in his mother tongue, and especially so when he sought to move nearer to God.

8

Why then were these poets so drawn to the Psalms? It was not particular to the English, but to the very essence of the Reformation in its most profound form. By making the human voice heard with its full spectrum of contradictory emotions, they opened the way for lyricism, which had already been heartily encouraged by the devotia moderna, promoting the individual piety of the layman through the ideal of the imitation of Christ (Low Countries, fourteenth century). Subjectivity then would know no bounds. It would be possible for every human being to seek in the voice of David the accents that corresponded to his own voice and then to cry in wonder: “Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one,”[4]  John Donne (1572–1631), Divine Poems, vol. 1, No. 19,…[4] and from this torment draw almost unlimited poetic inspiration.

9

Amongst human nature’s innumerable contradictions carried within this voice, there is the clash of a resounding paradox: to allow humans to speak enables the voice of God to be heard more than ever. What the Reformation poet seeks above all is a dialogue. Perhaps it is the fear of being crushed by the Calvinistic theory of double predestinationism, which would have God isolated in a state of transcendence so distant, indeed so remote, that any communication with Him would be threatened. God would surely then become a complete alterity, to be approached only with fear and trembling (Luther), for this God might only manifest himself in the form of some spiritual death sentence, like the prophetic writing on the wall telling Balthazar of his imminent end.[5]  See Rembrandt, The Writing on the Wall, The National…[5] The hope of salvation (revealed in the inamissible grace of the conversion) transforms a person into an anxious lookout, forced to watch relentlessly lest he be blind or deaf to the signs that God may send to make known his will.

Thanks for all those calls and letters
Thanks for caring that I’m here.
In my darkest, lonesome moments
These replies will keep you near.

Thanks for answering all my emails
Thank you for the hours you give.
Thanks for sharing heartfelt thoughts
And being so generous with your love.

Thank you for your wit and grace,
Thank for your funny face.
Thank you for your deep blue gaze and
Thank you for your warm embrace.

Thank you,thank you,thank you,thank.
Love you,love you,love you,Love.
Thank you,thank you,thanks to you,
Because,because,because,Because

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/humor-and-poetry

Extract:

In 1993, I took a left turn one day out of my MFA program and found myself at the National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. There I discovered several poets who were funny for the sake of being funny. Particularly Hal Sirowitz from New York (“don’t stick your arm out the window, mother said” and Matt Cook from Milwaukee (“it was easy to write the Great American Novel, back when there were only five American novels”) Both poets initially delighted me and confounded me: There are no similes, a voice in my head said. What would Tom Lux (my first teacher) say? the voice continued. Despite my resistance, I believe those poets gave me a kind of permission to explore humor a little more vigorously in my second book, The Forgiveness Parade (1998), for “I thought the word loin and the word lion were the same thing. I thought celibate was a kind of fish”. Perhaps in that book there were places where I was too vigorous in my pursuit: looking back there are a few poems that are just a little too jokey somehow, a little one-dimensional.

I am becoming aware of how some humor can set a roadblock for the poetic speaker, making it impossible for the speaker to get back to a serious place. And how some other (less frequent) uses of humor can leave that door open. I want to leave that door open

How like a prison is my cubicle
How wary is  my body on this chair.
How still my heart and yet how truly fickle.
How fast it flies to you who are not here.

How elegant your letters and your thoughts
How gentle was your touch upon my throat.
And yet you killed  my words and all I brought...
You were no lover but a randy goat.

As in this mental jail I'm  neatly trapped,
I'll use this time to write and  also pray.
Perhaps my mind can extricate a map..
From which I'll plot the route to get away.

The prisons which seem external are inside
Yet in such captive grief, we humans  die.

The weight of those who’ve gone  pulls at my heart

They have wound me with their ropes so they can tug

And as I stumble through this world’s sick fog

I wonder  for how long we’ll be apart.

Should I cut the ropes that bind me hard?

Must I be sister cruel to those who’ve died?

They won’t want to know how much I’ve cried

Should I walk away from all we shared?

In the early morning, in the night.

I lie alone too long before the dawn.

Weeping at the moon . oh broken heart.

The images of loved ones hurt my sight.

But I must cut the ropes and venture on. 

Weep no more for all the ones who’ve gone

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/12/money-pervades-everything-the-psychotherapist-delving-into-our-deep-anxiety-about-finances?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other