La résponse est le Malheur de la question” is translated as, “The answer is the misfortune of the question.”
W Bion
The answer
Negative capability: how to embrace intellectual uncertainty – Ness Labs
https://nesslabs.com/negative-capability
D
The benefits of negative capability
Despite its name, negative capability is not harmful. It is only negative because it exists counter to false dichotomies, fixed mindsets, and complete confidence in your thoughts. It is about resisting quick explanations, sitting with our doubts, and questioning our assumptions. Not only can it lead to better creativity, but negative capability can also help us become more curious and more humble.
You can think of negative capability as the negative pole of an electric current. Passive and receptive, the negative pole receives current from the positive pole. In the same way, we can train ourselves to receive impulses from a world — inspiration which cannot be fully understood, but can be channeled into creativity
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Writing Can Help Us Heal from Trauma
“In my land,called holy, Yehuda Amichai
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/195955/amichai-israels-national-poet
Yet Amichai found ways of keeping those pressures at arm’s length. Take, for instance, the remarkable sequence of poems he wrote after the Six Day War, “Jerusalem, 1967.” These were exalted, intoxicating days, when the conquest of Jerusalem brought the Jews’ holy city under Jewish sovereignty for the first time in 2,000 years. The country was singing Naomi Shemer’s song “Jerusalem of Gold,” with its triumphant verse: “The wells are filled again with water,/ The square with joyous crowd,/ On the Temple Mount within the City, / The shofar rings out loud.” But here is how Amichai writes about the city where he lived most of his life:
Jerusalem stone is the only stone that can
feel pain. It has a network of nerves.
From time to time Jerusalem crowds into
mass protests like the tower of Babel.
But with huge clubs God-the-Police beats her
down: houses are razed, walls flattened,
and afterward the city disperses, muttering
prayers of complaint and sporadic screams from churches
and synagogues and loud-moaning mosques.
Each to his own place.
This section of “Jerusalem, 1967” demonstrates that Amichai evaded the claims of the national by viewing Israeli history in a perspective at once smaller and larger than the nation. On the one hand, he is less a poet of the state than a poet of the city, of Jerusalem. He writes about Jerusalem with the intimacy of a disillusioned lover, a friend who remains faithful despite repeated trials and impositions; he empathizes with the very stones. And Jerusalem, while it is a Jewish city, is also a Christian and Muslim city, irreducibly multicultural. “The city plays hide-and-seek among her names: Yerushalayim, Al-Quds, Salem, Jeru, Yeru,” Amichai writes.
What unites these cultures is the ardor of faith, the belief that in Jerusalem you are closer to God than elsewhere. “In my land, called holy, / they won’t let eternity be: / they’ve divided it into little religions, / zoned it for God-zones,” Amichai writes in “North of San Francisco.” This is the other half of Amichai’s double vision—his wary, wry intimacy with God, which is to say, his Judaism. Like the city of Jerusalem, the faith of the Jews is much older than the State of Israel and offers a release from contemporary political obsessions.
***
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Loss,the winter of the heart
I found it interesting to find a link between being able to be aware of other people as real people like ourselves and being secure in our inner being.That security or trust enables us to have an attitude called,”Submission to the will of God” in Christian teaching.I am sure it is common to many other religions especially Judaism.
Without trust in others life is much harder as we are always concerned with keeping ourselves safe.I am not sure how much we can change our attitude from Fear to Trust.
I recall a friend of mine dying when I was 15.We were taken to the Requiem Mass.I just recall the priest saying in the sermon something from the Bible
The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
In other words,we can’t understand.Life and death are a mystery but we accept this is the will of God
At the time I’m not sure if I believed it.But i think acceptance of pain and grief helps us to cope with it even with the terrible suffering with losing a child.I was the last classmate to see her.It was late October.We left school and walked about 1/2 mile.I lived there but she had to then catch a bus fo ra 4 mile journey
I still see her smiling face.Eight days later she died.
When you suffer a lot it’s hard to trust God,the Universe and all else.And depending on the circumstances it’s easy to be bitter or vengeful.But that will not help.
What I am wondering is:
How much can we change our attitudes by will power.Pr is there another way of changing?
Changing the way we see something may give us a different attitude.Talking to a good person may help.Sometimes we can only endure patiently.Sometimes God comes to us in the wilderness of tragedy,grief and pain.Because he can get in when we are still and silent.
I suppose going to the desert or on a Retreat may give us the same opportunity.Sometimes we can’t verbalise our suffering but that is not a problem.I found after seeking many ways out that as many people have said:
The way out is through.
But we struggle like hell to avoid it!
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How one person affects history:Martin Luther
Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitic Legacy—500 Years Later
April 28, 2017 in Featured,
By Marilyn Cooper
Five hundred years ago, legend has it that a renegade Catholic monk named Martin Luther (1483-1546) angrily strode up the steps of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany and defiantly nailed Ninety-Five Theses harshly critiquing the Roman Catholic Church to the chapel door. It was the proverbial shot heard round the world. Due to a game changing new piece of technology—the printing press—copies of the Ninety-Five Theses spread through Germany within two weeks and throughout Europe in the next two months. The document catalyzed the Protestant Reformation, a revolutionary movement that resulted in a permanent schism in the Christian Church and radically altered the entire course of history in Western Europe.
The 500th anniversary, which numerous conferences, museum exhibits and special events and publications are commemorating throughout 2017, has a much darker significance for Jews. While Martin Luther initially had a relatively positive relationship with German Jews, he eventually adopted vociferously anti-Jewish rhetoric and promoted violence against Jews. His views helped shape centuries of anti-Semitic attitudes in Western Europe, and the Nazis later used his writing to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment.
During the first decade or so of his career, Martin Luther personally identified with the plight of Jews in Europe and declared that both he and the Jews had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church. Luther broke with the then-prevalent view that the Jews had killed Christ and in his 1523 essay “That Jesus Was Born a Jew” condemned the harsh treatment of the Jews. “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian,” he wrote. “They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.” Luther’s motivations were not entirely altruistic, he hoped to persuade German Jews to join his anti-Catholic crusade and convert to Christianity.
Failing at that and following an epic case of food poisoning in 1528 brought on by eating a kosher meal—Luther was convinced that the Jewish community had tried to poison him—in a dramatic about face, Luther denounced the Jewish religion and called for severe persecution of Jews. This culminated in his infamous 1543 pamphlet, “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” in which he urged Christians to “set fire to their synagogues or schools” and ordered that Jewish “houses also be razed and destroyed” and additionally declared that, “their rabbis [should] be forbidden to teach on pain of loss of life and limb.” Even on his deathbed, Luther raged that the Christians had failed to slay the Jews.
Luther’s writings incited violence against Jews for the next half-millennium; this culminated in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1933, pro-Nazis in the Lutheran Church formed the German Christian’s Faith Movement. This virulently anti-Semitic movement adhered to the Nazi doctrine of a German super race and the inferiority of all other races, especially the Jews. This “Reich Church” banned the use of the Hebrew Bible because of its Jewish origins, barred Christians with “Jewish blood” and eventually replaced the cross with the swastika. On December 17, 1941, seven Lutheran regional confederations issued a statement supporting the laws that forced Jews to wear a yellow star writing that “Luther had strongly suggested [such] preventive measures against the Jews.” Deeply devoted to Martin Luther’s anti-Judaism, this church dominated German Protestantism and Lutheranism throughout World War II.
The ideas and writings of Martin Luther impacted Hitler’s regime well beyond the “Reich Church.” According to historian Robert Michael, almost every anti-Jewish book published in the Third Reich referred to, and quoted from, Martin Luther. Similarly, British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that Luther’s 1543 pamphlet was the “blueprint” for Kristallnacht, noting that Lutheran Bishop Martin Sasse in his published compendium of Luther’s writings rejoiced in the coincidence that Kristallnacht took place on Luther’s birthday. The Nazi Party forcefully asserted that Adolf Hitler was continuing the work of Luther. Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Minister of Education, echoed this when he wrote, “I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together—they are of the same old stamp.”
After the end of World War II and the revelations of the horrors of the death camps, a slow process of reconciliation began. The Roman Catholic Church renounced its theological anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council of 1965, but took another 50 years to withdraw its official support of missionary work aimed at converting Jews. In 1994, the 5-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in American recognized and renounced Luther’s “anti-Judaic diatribes” and rejected “the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews.” The European branches of the Lutheran church have gradually followed suit. After Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, called upon the Protestant church to disavow Luther’s anti-Jewish writings, in November of 2016 the Lutheran Church in Germany issued a statement condemning Luther’s anti-Semitism and acknowledging, “the part played by the Reformation tradition in the painful history between Christians and Jews.” The state Lutheran churches of Norway and the Netherlands have since made similar declarations.
Today, two images displayed on the outside wall of Castle Church in Wittenberg, German aptly reflect the complex legacy of the protestant Reformation. The first is a Judensau or “Jew-Pig,” a sculpture from the late 14th century that disparagingly depicts a rabbi pulling up the tail of a female pig and looking into its backside while other Jews kneel down to suckle on the animal’s teats—Martin Luther praised the sculpture in one of his pamphlets. Directly below the Judensau is a Holocaust memorial plaque. The Castle Church installed it on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht to counteract the anti-Semitic sculpture. There have been demonstrations and repeated calls for the removal of the Judensau and 30 other similar “Jewish pig” sculptures on churches around Germany, but local Jewish leaders in Wittenberg want the Judensau to remain as a testimony to the anti-Semitism of Germany’s past. When viewed together, they contend, the two images ensure that today’s Germans will recognize and grapple with the totality of their troubling past.
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I dreamed about religion
I dreamed I was not Catholic last night
I was in a church,unlit by candlelight
The clergyman had got no vestments on
She gave an long and Lutheran sermon
We had no Consecration then at all
But later we had Tizer and played ball
Apparently we have Communion now and then
After an extremely lengthy and Lutheran sermon
We don’t kneel in a Confessional and admit
We kicked our little brother in the butt
So we have got no penance then to come
After an extremely lengthy, long and Lutheran sermon
We sang these great old hymns by Bunyan
I loved them each and every single one.
But where had all the ceremonial gone?
Instead it’s extremely lengthy, long and boring Lutheran sermon.
We mayn’t pray to Jude for hopeless cause
Nor ask Our Lady’s aid from hellish maws
We speak direct to God when we feel glum
On a stunning, Lutheran smartphone .
So God must have got alot pairs of ears;
Lots of eyes to weep about what he hears
He can’t have any helpers, even nuns;
What an extremely lengthy, long and trying carry on.
I woke up in the middle of the dream
And gave a loud and highly penetrating scream
My boyfriend said he knew sex was a sin
He rang St Francis on his mobile phone
Now I go to Mass on weekdays if I can
Although I’m so unattractive I’ve been banned
But any ritual is really better than
That extremely lengthy, long and tedious,boring Lutheran Protestant, learned,unexciting , super superfluous sermon.
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Enjoy your Christmas holiday with the daily telegraph UK. Short of board games?
Families urged to spot signs of dementia at Christmas
Memory slips such as forgetting to put the turkey in the oven could be an indicator of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, say experts
ByLaura Donnelly, HEALTH EDITOR26 December 2022 • 6:00am
Families are being urged to seek help from the NHS after spotting signs that could mean dementia during Christmas festivities.
Health experts said memory slips – such as forgetting to put the turkey in the oven, or forgetting names and presents – could be an indication of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
The NHS is embarking on a drive
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Change your email address on WordPress
if you want to change your email address on your WordPress blog you must use an email address that you have not used for a different blog on WordPress because I thought I had change mine but find that it was not changed because I used to have a philosophy blog 9 years ago and I had forgotten that that was the email address I used 4 that blog.I left the blog open
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Creating tragic plays and untold wars
In my sleep I dream my unthought thoughts
Creating tragic plays and loathsome wars
I feel the feelings which i have not sought
Healing is not created with an ought
Neither does it come from Santa Claus
In my sleep I dream my unthought thoughts
When I waken up my dreams feel short
They’re more akin to poetry than prose
I feel strange feelings which I have not sought
I feel the pain in my unclothed heart
How little children suffer loss uncaused
In my sleep I dream my unthought thoughts.
I will feel the feelings I abhorr
This is love and we must feel far more
In my dreams I think my unthought thoughts
I will feel the feelings I’ve not sought
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When grit isn’t great: letting go rather than pushing through can help our wellbeing
Deny and become: the radical ethos of negative capability | Aeon Essays
A Poem by Richard Wilbur: ‘A Black Birch in Winter’ – The Atlantic
There are a few lucky people who survived very dangerous illnesses and scientists are studying their blood to see if they can find the reason
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.
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He bent down on his right knee
-
Oh,John Joe was a farmer’s son.
- He lived up in the hills
- When he went to tend his sheep
- He saw the cotton mills.
- The rivers ran with water pure
- And so provided power
- Yet over these dark ruined towns
- The heathered hills did tower.
-
Mary was a local girl
- Se walked out on the moors
- She wore a dress of silky cloth
- Printed with small flowers.
-
John Joe saw Mary
-
When he was dipping sheep
-
She peered over a dry stone wall
-
And saw the new lambs leap.
-
Her hair was long.Her hair was gold
-
Her eyes were sapphire blue.
-
In John Joe’s eyes she was so fair
-
What was a man to do?
-
He watched her walking all alone
-
Was she sad or sick?
-
He showed her how his dog behaved
-
And showed her shepherds’ tricks.
-
So one day,he held her hand
-
As they walked to the Pike.
-
They stood up there and gazed all round
-
So John thought he would strike.
-
He bent down on his right knee
-
And spoke to Mary then.
-
I’ve loved you Mary since we met
-
I hoped we’d meet again
-
Mary smiled with her blue eyes;
-
Her lips were pink and bright.
-
I love you too and love the hills
-
And. love the summer light.
-
The next year they were married
-
Mary wore white lace.
-
She looked so happy then
-
To know she’d her own place.
-
The church bells rang,the people sang
-
John and Mary wed!
-
And naturally, when evening came,
-
At last, they went to bed.
-
When Mary lay in John Joe’s arms
-
She knew this was her home.
-
And so for many, many years
-
About the hills they roamed.
-
They cared for sheep and hens and goats
-
They cared for children three.
-
They never had a falling out…
-
But talked beneath a tree.
-
From youth to age the years went by
-
But John still loved his bride.
-
And Mary too was happy
-
With John Joe by her side.
-
Their faces,lined, were full of cheer
-
Their hair as white as snow
-
And everywhere that JJ went
-
Mary too did go.
-
Until the day came for his death
-
He lay down in the grass
-
Mary ran and held him close
-
And thus sweet John did pass.
-
The muffled bells rang from the tower
-
John Joe was carried in.
-
The parson prayed and hymns were sung.
-
The sheep dog made a din.,
-
In the dark earth John was laid
-
And Mary wept and cried.
-
what will I do now,my sweet John ,
-
without you by my side?
-
So Mary grieved and wept and sighed
-
And thus she spent two years…
-
The loss was great and bent her back
-
with the weight of care.
-
For when we open up our hearts
-
We feel both joy and woe.
-
This is the pattern of our love,
- Which like the river flows
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Wilfred Bion and The Importance of Not-Knowing
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
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Is there sacredness in this world now?
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
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Poetry – Simple English Wikipedia
Dangerous hospitals
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.
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Why not watch Ben-Hur?
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.
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What we’re getting wrong in the conversation about mental health
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.
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The Paris Review – The Vale of Soul-Making – The Paris Review
The Vale of Soulmaking…John Keats
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
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Cracked shall be the golden bowl
Soul making is a phrase from Keats.{ link to article by Jeffrey C. Johnson in Paris Review]
We saw Wolf Hall on TV recently and it is so wonderful.I am just writing down a few of my thoughts not about that but about Anne Boleyn… I meant it to be funny but I couldn’t manage that after seeing the play.
ANNE BOLEYN
Anne Boleyn withheld to win
As Henry lusted in his sin.
Once a virgin,sweet Madonna;
Henry turned in rage on her.
She bore him but one living child,
For her quips,she was reviled.
Henry knew not the fault was his
It seems the king had syphilis.
Or Anne was rhesus negative
then just her first born child would live.
We women make our worst mistake
When power for love we wrongly take
Our strength lasts but till we submit.
We need less love and far more wit.
Whatever lusty men may say,
their “love” dies when they get their way.
And they will take their wife by force
As cannons pound on oaken doors.
As for women,we must not
Promise gold we have not got.
Conception is a game of chance;
it happens more by happy chance.
we sin in pride in promising
What only God or Nature bring.
We deceive and trick and charm
At last our hearts bang in alarm
The man who begged upon his knees
Chops off our heads when we displease.
For Emperors and Kings and Lords
Wield fearful power by the sword.
Yet when for judgement they shall stand
How will point the knowing hand?
And just like us they’ll ashen be
When true majesty they see.
Into dust and crumbled ruin
they will go by their own doings.
Each day create with grace your soul.
Cracked shall be the golden bowl.
Keats wrote this extract below [read all by clicking on soul above[ and he died when aged only 25 years:
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!
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Keats and negative capability
“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”
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What did the reformation do?
Than the song of birds,he had the words
He ‘d held me in his arms and said,
what I had never read,
That life is more than learned discourse.
So as he spoke, I watched his face
And his rich dark eyes;of course
His eyes gave out such natural force
More strong and subtle than the song of birds.
Yes,almost like a poet’s words
In how he moved me like no other man;
No matter how they think they can,
They lose the step and do not dance
And never ever chance
A leap when they might lift me high
Above their head. I’d want to fly.
Yes,the form and feeling give an extra note
To express those feelings more remote…..
We do not need to speak or write
We have both touch and our eye sight.
And yet our human discourse is a need
An anchor,lest the current’s speed
Should crash us down on Coniston,
And we’d be gone.
Just write it down
A verb ,a noun..
A string of sighs,our mouths,our eyes.
A paragraph that never dies,
within your finger tips and cries
For pen and paper and my wish to save
Some part of you,some heart some art
far beyond your grave.
Your gaze.
My days
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As Alchemists foretold
God’s son was born on earth.
A young girl gave him birth.
His words remind us of our worth,
Gave hope of heavenly mirth.
He brought the gifts of love-
To cure our bad eyesight.
But we don’t want to see,
Bear painfulness of light.
We love our flaws unknowing,
Even as we’re sorrow sowing
We rage when someone points them out,
We’d rather stay in dark and doubt
Than have our weakness showing
But when we seek advice
From someone wise and true,
They tell us that our hearts will be
Healed when we can bear to see
The mirror’s total view,
The looking glass is truth
It’s painfully acquired.
But, oddly ,when we face the glass,
A transformation comes to pass,
And our souls change from black to gold,
As Alchemists foretold
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I’d like to lie beside you
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!
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I long to see your face just one more time.
I long to see your face just one more time.
I didn’t know that day would be the last.
I can’t create the real by using rhyme.
You’d smoke a cigarette and write some lines
About the mountains that we’d climbed or passed
I long to see your face just one more time.
On Ingleborough we had made designs
But heavy rain came down and we were lost
I can’t create the real by using rhyme.
We turned around as if it were a crime,
For we knew such decisions have a cost
I long to see your face just one more time.
I teased you on the muddy slopes in mime
I could not speak for I had seen your ghost
I can’t create the real by using rhyme.
In Dent or up in Teesdale will you come?
Or by scarred boats in Staithes, eternal rest?
I long to see your face just one more time.
I can’t create the real by using rhyme.
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Red maple tree
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.
How my heart speaks 