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The situation of health/social care in the UK

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The situation of health/social care in the UK

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Responding to her appointment Matthew Taylor, chief executive for NHS Confederation said: "Our new Prime Minister has set out the NHS as one of her top three priorities and so, alongside the coupling of the health secretary post with the deputy prime minister position, all eyes will be on whether we have a Government that finally delivers for the NHS and the communities it serves."

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Hi all, here is the Zoom link for tomorrow's meeting, 7-9 pm BST. I realise some peeps can't make it, but it's easier for me to keep a set Zoom em list whenever I send messages out.

I have included a poetry section, if anyone wishes to read out a poem (see below). I will be sending out a Padlet link with information soon, and if you want your poem/link to be included in Padlet let me know.

As the Meet sections will cut out after 40 mins, please come back into it using the same link (below).

For future Zoom Meets, I am considering putting them on Saturdays 12 noon to 2pm BST (British standard time) to accommodate International timings. Any feedback on general availability to attend at this time would be appreciated.

Section 1:

Poetry with the theme of being Authentic (what does it mean to you?)

Chiron you have written poetry throughout your book. If you wish to choose some to read out that would be great.

If participants wish to read one poem out on the theme, that would also be great.

Section 2:

Presenting Special Guest Chiron O Keefe, author of Bravely You, Bravely Me.

Section 3:

Q&A with Chiron. Discussion. Time for any more poetry?

Love and Light

Amanda

Amanda Derry is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: SouL Zoom with Chiron: My Story- Being the Authentic Me.
Time: Sep 5, 2022 07:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/71676925272?pwd=YBkCEXb2L3N4bL5kBnS45sF2Tbp8nQ.1

Meeting ID: 716 7692 5272
Passcode: QK3weD

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Chiron O’Keefe is an author and free-lance dreamer who taught herself how to consciously heal a deeply fractured self-image. Utilizing techniques found in a variety of books, she developed insights into transforming from a wounded child into an integrated woman of strength and clarity.
Her book, “Bravely You, Bravely Me: Being You Without Apology,” incorporates a series of essays where she shares intimate details of a harrowing childhood along with those stunning moments of insight that brought her to a path of wholeness. The book blends memoir with self-care guidance, including follow-up exercises, affirmations, and a deeper review of key concepts following each chapter.
Her path to understanding began in her early years, with intense dreams prompting questions, and provocative books providing perspective. Considering herself a lifelong student, a mystic, and a woman eager to be her bravest self, Chiron celebrates life with passion and humor. Playfulness is as vital as study, and within the pages of her book, she invites the reader to utilize imagination and visualization to uncover lifelong beliefs. With new understanding we gain perspective and the strength of objectivity, which allows us to break through patterns and move into a new psychological dynamic.

************

I've written a short presentation. I will not be sharing poetry this time. <3 After the presentation, we can open it up for discussion.

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

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'Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.'
e.e Cummings

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"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life," wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. "The true and durable path into and through experience," Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, "involves being true ... to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge."

Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belief stems from the habitual conceit of a culture blinded by its own presentism bias, ignorant of the past's contextual analogues. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continually reinforce in our present informational ecosystem - a Pavlovian system of constant feedback, in which the easiest and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.

Few people in the two centuries since Emerson issued his exhortation to "trust thyself" have countered this culturally condoned blunting of individuality more courageously and consistently than E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894-September 3, 1962) - an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self because, in the words of his most incisive and competent biographer, he "despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it."

A fortnight after the poet's fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper published a short, enormous piece by Cummings under the title "A Poet's Advice to Students," radiating expansive wisdom on art, life, and the courage of being yourself. It went on to inspire Buckminster Fuller and was later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) - that wonderful out-of-print collection which the poet himself described as "a cluster of epigrams, forty-nine essays on various subjects, a poem dispraising dogmata, and several selections from unfinished plays," and which gave us Cummings on what it really means to be an artist.

Addressing those who aspire to be poets - no doubt in that broadest Baldwinian sense of wakeful artists in any medium and courageous seers of human truth - Cummings echoes the poet Laura Riding's exquisite letters to an eight-year-old girl about being oneself and writes:

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel - but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling - not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Cummings should know - just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship - the MacArthur of poetry - Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with tradition and being nobody-but-himself in his art. With an eye to that unassailable creative integrity buoyed by relentless work ethic, he adds:

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we're not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world - unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

Complement the thoroughly invigorating E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised with a lovely illustrated celebration of Cummings's creative bravery, then revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren on what it really means to find yourself and Janis Joplin on the courage of being what you find.

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

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"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life," wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. "The true and durable path into and through experience," Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, "involves being true ...

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On the theme of: First Poems and My Writing Journey:

I started writing poetry (whatever poetry is) fairly recently, in my forties. I may have written some before then at sporadic times. I attended a Creative Writing  Class in 2009 after a breakdown- which led to new directions and all sorts of wonderful things- voluntary work in a local church, running a Therapy Art Group, teaching in the Community (which I still do, online), continuing to run an informal social/cultural group which has evolved over the years, running this writing page for a number of years (which Neil Holland is kindly helping me with) and also hosting an online Zoom well-being Discussion group and meeting many fascinating people- some of whom are part of this writing page.
Poetry has been a part of my personal journey to finding self expression, working through my feelings- uncovering my 'authentic self'. Apparently you don't 'find' yourself- you were there all along.
I've always had the ability to express my thoughts or messages well in writing, sometimes better than in words. I'm grateful that recent, emotionally challenging times have enabled me to utilise the tool of writing. Writing is a practical, spiritual, artistic means of communication.

This poem is about when I was sixteen and struggling to know my place in this World; I'm so glad I'm discovering this now:

16

When I was sixteen
School and bullying behind me
Losing my chubbiness
Trying to find my identity
A spiritual place was Staithes
Familiar cottages and boats jostling
The experience paves
My way into womanhood.

25/11/2012

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I don't know if I'm a leader- I do have leadership skills- but it is also a great attribute to be a follower and supporter.

I taught adult learners in the community (as a support teacher and then a teacher) for 10 years. I worked with learners which included those who spoke English as a second language, had basic skills difficulties, or learning disabilities/difficulties. I understood them, because although I've been privileged to have an education and many quals, I've struggled with my own mental health/confidence. I tended to compare myself with others- which is never a good idea!

Although I loved community centre classes and later online teaching, I suppose the ethos of my working org changed and became counter effective to my experiences and I was tired of beating my head against the system, when it felt I wasn't going to win my case or get back on the same page as them.

So I've fallen back on my original social community based groups which helped my process of mental health recovery.  I'm leading my online (Zoom) group SouL, partaking in a long running social wellbeing group I helped set up called 4th Space (originally 3rd Space with Val Horbaczewski ). I  started a new art project within a great place on the border of N Wales called the Old Chapel which Lisa Rossetti  is also involved with, and I've maintained an interest in other social/community based groups. I have also undertaken Personal Care qualifications in order to help my 91 year old friend Ann Anderson . I run a longterm writing page on Facebook called I LOVE WRITING, and I invite writers of any description to contribute their work and get involved in supportive discussion. I am a firm believer in the therapeutic effect of the arts and have a Facebook page called Amanda's Vintage Designs. I have run workshops and am open to future activities, I undertake commissions and sell through a local Church called St John's the Baptist where I have volunteered for a number of years. Recently I told the Old Chapel I'm glad I didn't put all my eggs in one basket with my career, but maintained involvement with voluntary work and social and well-being groups. These have been my lifeline when my Father passed at the end of last year.

Although workplaces may expect their workers to evolve and change with them (and also in IT areas which is where my org was heading) if we can't, perhaps we need to separate ourselves and go into other areas where we can evolve and change in authentic and more comfortable ways. Since recovering from my breakdown in 2012, I believe I need to find or create the spaces I belong to; where I can help others with their own development and this is a mutual process.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share my story. I have actually already shared my 'life story' with the Old Chapel's Richard Coan this week- so I am doing pretty well!

This is a photo of a recent visit to Lancaster with my hubby. To escape a busy traffic road with a school and hospital, we found another route alongside a lovely field which went down to the Canal with lots of wildlife x

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Liver birds wings, by Cristina Steliana Mihailovici, a poem included in the Everyman Theatre Show, " Love, Liverpool ".

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Liver birds wings, by Cristina Steliana Mihailovici, a poem included in the Everyman Theatre Show, " Love, Liverpool ".

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They’re flying high

Their wings are strong

They watching over horizon:

The sea at right,

The town at left,

Decades of power and respect.

A history of lives and hope’s

The power and the culture’s scouse,

Cathedrals’ bells,

The Beatles songs,

Protecting all.

The symbols and the Mersey’s keys

The sailors victory’s at seas,

Their treasures, loves and families.

Bella and Bertie still hear those

From Lusitania heroes

In Liverpool, this town of dreams

This town of legends

Written on their wings.

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Poems...

I have a couple of poems I wrote in times past, which allude to dance/ use its metaphor, though it is not the specific topic of the poem. You're welcome to peruse if you feel like it:

Altruistic Mismatch
Seeking rudely with intent
Differentiated (by) laws
Movement etched by limb by chord
Lapped layers of space of time
Comprise a cut glass line
Overlapping worlds are rent

Perfection pirou-heated
To the fore leading lady
Led by light fall back hasty
Encore troupe of line of flow
Submerged iridescent glow
Metro gnome worm tongue meted

Shakespeare is art cried Babel
Legislature grey decried
Treat his peace night’s sleep belied
Contracts not a whip enshrined
Bonding love by act by lie
Creating any fable?

(20th Oct ‘15)

Time
A darkening moon in an ethereal sky
Where-under the hob-goblins play
There’s Pan with his flute in the wavering grass
And Satyr deep in blooms lain
The rush of the wind in the Banshee’s cry
A thundering waterfall’s crash
All to be found where the pixies prance
In the heart of the old wood gloom

I’ve found a path to a sacred place
Where never man’s foot has touched
The tepid rain to my fingertips
To the soles of my feet, velvet grass
An urchin, an elf, nay a faerie’s child
My hands to its own has taken
And we’ll dance this night to a bantering tune
‘Till the light of the morn doth waken

An eerie call and my bones the shudder
An end to the flowing music of the night

A brightening orb in a rainbow sky
Where-under the buttercups sway
I see a bird with a mission on bending limb
And starlings far overhead fly
The call of the wild in a centipede’s eye
A memory’s painful nostalgia
All to be found where a scar cuts deep
In the heart of the old man gloom

Vision within vision, time out of mind
A path that’s cut to a groove
To follow it senseless, its cushioning smile
I’ll never betray you, no never
To wander, to stumble, to blindly search out
The walls of one’s prison confine
And cold slabbed stone to stimulate one’s touch
As the bars of the sun’s beams gaze on

An eerie call and my bones they shudder
An end to the ragged beat of time

The sweet sea spray on a fabled cliff
Where gulls come in to land
And the swirling currents of vapourous airs
In a cavern known only to the tides
Are witness to the passage of change
And the torpor of life in its coil
And they see the figure by the ebbing shore
Within whom a chrysalis forms

(21-22nd Mar ‘95)

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From Anne W- contains a short story worth reading:

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"Heart of Grass" it's a collection of "green poems" dedicated to the environment, from various artists of Liverpool   Here is my poem included in this beautiful anthology:

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"Heart of Grass" it's a collection of "green poems" dedicated to the environment, from various artists of Liverpool   Here is my poem included in this beautiful anthology:

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[A cloud of flowers!]
Matsuo Basho - 1643-1694

A cloud of flowers!
Is the bell Uyeno
Or Asakusa?
—Translation by William George Aston

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https://allpoetry.com/For-whom-the-Bell-Tolls

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Second poem from Article on Hungry Ghosts (posted on 4th Space Padlet):

Excerpt from the Garuda Purana (Vedas), explaining the origin of one hungry ghost:
translation J.L. Shastri, Verse 2.7.53 - 2.7.61, from VEDA -Vedas and Vedic Knowledge Online

Once an aged woman of the brahmana caste went to the holy place Bhadravrata. The old woman lived with her son aged five years.

I being a ksatriya pretender stopped her in the wilderness, became a wayside robber and took her viaticum with clothes along with the dress of her son. I wrapped them around my head and wanted to leave. I saw the little boy drinking water from a jar. In that wilderness, only that much water was there.

I frightened the boy from drinking water and being thirsty myself began to drink from the jar. The boy died of thirst and the mother who was struck with grief died too, by throwing herself into a dry well.

O brahmana, by that sin I became a ghost with mouth as small as the hole of a needle and body as huge as a mountain.
Although I get food I cannot eat.
Although I burn with hunger my mouth is contracted.
Since in my mouth I have a hole equal to that of a needle I am known as Sucimukha.'

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Poem from article on Hungry Ghosts:

Tirokudda Kanda: Hungry Shades Outside the Walls
(Petavatthu Verse 1.5, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 2010)

Outside the walls they stand,
& at crossroads.
At door posts they stand,
returning to their old homes.
But when a meal with plentiful food
& drink is served,
no one remembers them:
Such is the kamma of living beings.
Thus those who feel sympathy for their dead relatives
give timely donations of proper food
& drink — exquisite, clean — [thinking:]
"May this be for our relatives. May our relatives be happy!"
And those who have gathered there,
the assembled shades of the relatives,
with appreciation give their blessing
for the plentiful food & drink:
"May our relatives live long
because of whom we have gained [this gift].
We have been honored,
and the donors are not without reward!"
For there [in their realm]
there's no farming, no herding of cattle,
no commerce, no trading with money.
They live on what is given here,
hungry shades whose time here is done.
As water raining on a hill flows down to the valley,
even so does what is given here benefit the dead.
As rivers full of water fill the ocean full,
even so does what is given here benefit the dead.
"He gave to me, she acted on my behalf,
they were my relatives, companions, friends":
Offerings should be given for the dead
when one reflects thus on things done in the past.
For no weeping, no sorrowing no other lamentation
benefits the dead whose relatives persist in that way.
But when this offering is given,
well-placed in the Sangha,
it works for their long-term benefit and they profit immediately.
In this way the proper duty
to relatives has been shown,
great honor has been done to the dead,
and monks have been given strength:
The merit you've acquired isn't small.

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A greasy spoon café in a London suburb. The cook-cum-waiter was pleasant and we started to talk. He was from a country with a totalitarian regime. In his home country he was not a cook or a waiter, but a documentary-filmmaker.

‘There is a time for everything in life and this is not my time now to be thinking of such things,’ he said to me. ‘Now I am improving my English and I thank God every day that I live in this country now, where people have such freedom. In my country of origin you have to be very careful when you are trying to record the truth because the truth there is different from other countries. Do you have a profession, madam?’

‘Most of my life I’ve been a nurse, and I have been able to combine it with my love of travel, and living in different countries has taught me so much. At the moment I’m trying to write down some of my experiences but I’m finding it quite difficult to discipline myself.’

‘I love to write but what I really enjoy is filming. There is a saying that the camera never lies but I have watched some documentaries and I can see that the truth is hidden.’

This is not necessarily a conversation you expect to tumble into when you pop into somewhere for a cup of tea, but, like I said, I’m up for this kind of thing.

‘What was the last documentary you worked on?’

‘My team and I were seeking access to a prison towards the centre of the capital where enemy prisoners of war were being held and had been held for about sixteen years, from the time of a bitter conflict. It took us years to gain permission – but then once you have permission, you know that the film you have to make will be a film for government eyes, so you keep a separate film of the truth to yourself and wait for the right time to be able to show people what is really going on.’

The prisoners being held –military officers of varying ranks – were really being held as a human shield. The Government of the time made it crystal clear to the Government of their erstwhile enemies that if they bombed this particular prison, then they would be killing their own senior military personnel. Some prisoners had lost their minds, a few had been held in solitary confinement and one of those was a trained singer with a beautiful voice.

The part of the prison where these men were incarcerated had very, very high ceilings with small glass panels near the top to let in a bit of daylight. One of the small panes in this prisoner’s cell had a corner broken off of it. Through this broken window pane, the man with the wonderful voice used to look up at the sky as he lay on his back in his cell and sing to the clouds. It was his whole focus. He became mesmerized by this tiny glimpse of the outside world that represented freedom. And this is what he said had kept him going.

Every day at certain times he would sing. Unbeknownst to him, other prisoners would listen eagerly to his beautiful voice and the words of his songs. Some were folksongs from their home, or nationalistic songs but others were his own. He would sing about freedom.

All this was being told to me by the prisoners I interviewed, who went on to say that one day, after a few years of this incarceration, a bird flew into his cell through the broken pane of glass and became his friend. Prisoners would only be fed once a day and he would save a little piece of bread and share it with this bird.

When the film team were interviewing other prisoners, many said it was this man’s voice and the words of his songs that had kept them going, and helped them maintain hope. They needed to believe and pray that they would one day get back home and see their families. This man, who thought he was completely alone and isolated, was in fact a lifeline for other prisoners with whom he had no contact and of whom he had no knowledge.

The reason the filmmakers had finally been allowed into the prison was that it was just before a prisoner-exchange was to take place. The end of the documentary featured the men shuffling out of the prison, being put in buses and driven to the border, and the receiving of those who were left of their counterpart POWs, who had been incarcerated for the same number of years. It was an ‘official’ tape, which was handed over to the authorities. Out of sight and hearing of the authorities, however, a tape containing the bits consigned to the cutting-room floor, tells the fuller story. When this young film-maker, whose name, nationality and domicile I am deliberately not giving you, decided to leave, his co-filmmakers said to him: ‘We know you have a copy of the tape, the same as we do. But remember that we will still be here while you will be free in the West. Be careful what you do with this tape, because we are still here.’ They embraced, and he left.

He is keeping the tape for a time when it can be shown.

I have always been aware, from as far back as I can remember, that all around us there are stories to be told. We don’t have to go to exotic climes. The stories surround us, wherever we are. All it takes is the time and the kindness - to listen.

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FULL CIRCLE

Nearing the end of my book, I go back to the beginning and read it again. Although I know there is much, much more, I can’t help wondering. Am I saying: ‘See father. You and your ‘No daughter of mine will spend the rest of her life wiping other people’s bottoms?’ This, and so much more – has been my life, and I am proud of it. Look what I have learned. Humility; how similar we all are under the skin; how hopelessly ineffectual and lacking in vision are politicians; how magnificent we all can be despite our human frailty.’ But, I also have come to know how wise and sensitive my father was. A womanizer – yes. Unable to face his demons – probably, didn’t know how to treat women, and there were many women – definitely. But, on balance, despite the messy childhood, curtailed cruelly at age ten, I know now that I love and respect his memory. In his own, clumsy remote-controlled way, he loved us, and tried to protect us.

I combined the qualities of my mother and father quite naturally into my life, unplanned, just doing what I do. What a trip it has been, and will be again.

My father, who died at the age of eighty-five, never flew in an airplane. Not because he was afraid. When I worked in Australia in the ’70s, I invited him to visit Alice Springs for a holiday, my treat. We spoke on the telephone. He said ‘Thank you for inviting me, Anne. I know Australia well, and sailed there many times over the years. It took us eight whole weeks to get there. Our ship glided slowly and steadily through time zones. We watched people’s skin colours darken; listened to languages changing; felt climates heat and cool; tasted the myriad exotic flavours of the foods of different lands, and experienced the cultures so different from our own. There was a tremendous sense of travelling around the world, savouring the distances, taking pride in just getting there safely, and enjoying every moment of the trip.

‘I have no desire to enter a metal tube which hurtles at speed through the skies. Will my fellow passengers appreciate, as I have done, the wonders of this world? Will they have the same sense of just how vast is the distance travelled? One should not rush from one point to the other, not heeding the differences. Their only interest is whether their hotel is comfortable, or not, as the case might be.

‘So I will see you when you return home, and look forward to that time.’

And he never, ever flew. I would like to end this book by including that, because I think in this day of rush, rush, rush, it is important to remember that age.

When I was just turned sixteen, I can’t recall how it started, but I had a terrible argument with my father over poverty. It became heated, passionate and there were tears; both from him, and from me. With the certain knowledge, and teenage arrogance of the 16year-old, I held forth on poverty.

My father started shouting (boy, he could really shout). Something I said had touched a nerve. ‘You think you know about poverty. You know nothing. When you go to Calcutta as I have done, and watch people lie down in their piece of gutter as the sun goes down, and rise with the sun; then you can talk to me about poverty. There are people born in the gutter who grow up in the gutter, marry, carry on their little businesses and die in the same piece of gutter. They have no chance to even move to another piece of gutter. When you have seen this, we can discuss poverty, and not before.’

Tears streamed down his face during this particular scene. His passion silenced me. I was shocked.

Eighteen years later I was in Calcutta. There was a powerful moment when it was as though my father was looking over my shoulder, his words echoing down the years yet he was describing exactly what I was staring at in shocked compassion. He was right. Until that moment I had known nothing of poverty.

My rucksack had a broken buckle, and a favourite pair of sandals had a frayed strap. I saw a painfully thin man sitting cross legged at the side of the road. In front of him, spread out on a small piece of leather, were small piles of tin tacks, nails, needles and threads. He smiled brightly when I approached him. In London, the shoe menders in Oxford Street had laughed at my sandals and refused to repair the strap, saying they were not worth it. It was cheaper to buy a new pair. Here, the man looked at them carefully, smiled and told me he would fix it, together with the buckle on my rucksack. ‘Come back in thirty minutes, Madam,’ When I returned, he had reinforced the sandal, soled it and polished it. It was better than new. Plus he had strengthened all the leather fastenings on my rucksack. He asked for 2 rupees. I was so thrilled with his work, and to have my beloved sandal back, I gave him 4 rupees. He returned 1½ rupees, saying what he had taken was a fair price.

I have never forgotten him, his workmanship, his humility and his honesty. I understood then my father’s tears of anger and frustration.

I understood, too, that this man did not want a hand-out. He earned his living fairly and squarely.

My father always used to say – ‘When you are older, you will understand.’ Now I am older, and I still don’t understand. Not everything is fair in this world. It was not then and it is not now.

There are always more stories. Flickering across my mind’s eye are children – African, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Brazilian street kids, children from all over the world who suffer in one way or another; who don’t know the satisfaction of sitting down to a good meal or have never ever had safe water to drink. Leaders who stamp all over their hopes and dreams. Surrounded by plenty, I cannot understand why one part of the world has too much whilst others have nothing.

Roll up your sleeves and it’s not difficult to bring comfort through kindness and caring to those in this world who have been forsaken. The system, such as it is, isn’t working. It can’t be beyond our wit to heal this world through justice. Handouts are not the only answer. Bono said, ‘Millions of children die from mosquito bites and malaria. We can fix that. Millions of children die from not having safe water. We can dig wells. So why don’t we do it?’

Sting said, ‘We are a global village now,’ and we are.

Anyone who can afford a cheap ticket can fly all over the globe. Technological progress brings events happening on the other side of the world into our living rooms or even onto our mobile phones.

I’m more than halfway through my sixties now and the idealism I had as a teenager still burns within me. I’ve seen terrible sights as I’ve travelled through life, but also wonderful things and I know each and every one of us can make a difference.

In my stories, I have tried to convey this.

In this, the Twenty-First Century, isn’t it time for a radical change? The idealism does not need to stop.

We can do it.

The End

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/27/im-more-optimistic-poet-laureate-simon-armitage-tells-of-britains-great-ordeal

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Healing Poetry- some lovely poems on Audio Spotify:

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Healing Poetry- some lovely poems on Audio Spotify:

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EDJ5F2KiO628GF4qpY5qN

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A visual media poem

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There are Days - Child Memories

A small feeble boy steps off the train
Shivers and shudders timid restrain
At sudden hissing and belching of steam
Iron thunder on the rails sunlit gleam
Tracks shudder and shiver in refrain
Feared giants planted in child’s brain
Such dramas play in life’s unplanned scheme
Fortune changes nightmare into dream
Come tomorrow again and again
Giant heroes in final refrain

Soldiers rope swinging across a pond
A challenge for children to respond
There excited they swing each in turn
But the small boy he has much to learn
Rope stuck in unbreakable bond
Tearful, he slips into stinking pond
Laughter and jest will painfully burn
Face new challenge against tears return

Sudden call, a rustle of the leaves
Twigs break - sound scuttles, onward he weaves
Down gulleys and valleys, such delight
Trickle stream rebounds reflected light
Boys looking for tiddlers, birds take flight
Jumping, splashing, moment to excite
Digging holes in the bank, do it right
Hold jam jar straight, wait until it’s done
Caught finned wonder, sparkling in the sun

Sticks and stones thrown from a wooden bridge
Jolly Roger, pirates on the ridge
Screech of laughter and shouts in a roar
Rolling river, the new found sea shore
Firing arrows sticks from the forest floor
Then calm sailor’s sleep pretended snore
Tired bodies rest, last joyful yells
On the hill amongst all the bluebells.

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On the theme of 'walking' Heather O Brien wrote this one day after she'd taken her dogs out. This is unedited (by me) but the format is different to her original one written as prose/a very short story. It came out like this after copying, pasting; although I think the new format which is more poetry-like, suits the subject matter:

Pathway to freedom
I wander on my familiar dust path of green lane, with
my Charlie and Luna enjoying the grass smells. My
friend the Sparrowhawk above me, circles the sky,
flying solo. He is the free spirit now while I am confined
to my pathway. I carry my binoculars in the hope of
finding any new form of life. The first lamb was born 2
weeks ago in the field I pass. The sheep were still and
quiet then. My binoculars told me there were 2 dead
and 1 alive. I knocked on the nearest door to ask if the
farmer was aware. They would pass on the knowledge.
I see the odd tortoiseshell butterfly and many crows.
Leaves begining to appear on branches strangled by
ivy. A panic cry of a bird flies over and then it's mate
follows. Or is it just the throws of Spring. Many calls
from different birds which I would love to recognise.
Now many lambs born in the field, match marked red
for 1 lamb and blue for 2.
Passing over the cycle path. I stand on the overgrown
bridge and look to see what life exists down there.
Cyclists, and lone walkers for those who venture up to
'The Blue Bridge, Queensferry. Moel Fammau shows
it's might in the distance.
Moving on I reach the white 'nowhere house'. The
chimney only lit on cold days so no smoke today. Now
I reach the gate of safety into the field through the
kissing gate.. No traffic or horses now to worry about
for the dogs. My derelict farm next to me has laid
empty for 3 months now only visited by creatures and people seeking to exploit the situation. The police had
to come and reboard it.
I believe the field I am now in was once the sea! There
are sand dunes and I once found a shell. Half way
through the field is a small tree on the LHS. Look
into the tree to find something strange! Further.
On the RHS sits a large tree trunk to sit and snack.
The 3 fir trees at the bottom of the field is the 'short
walk' or you can turn left to go further. Now you are
near the horses and I count a different number each
time. 13 is the most I have counted. Now turn back
to retrace your steps.

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Pandemic Poems or Song(s) - from 11th Century read to last SoLL Meet

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Pandemic Poems or Song(s) - from 11th Century read to last SoLL Meet

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“With the strange cry of swans the pools are shrill:
The nightingale beneath the poplar shade
Singeth, as though remembering the passion,
Forgetful of the pain.
She sings, I hold my peace:
For when will come my spring?”

=-=-=-=-=-=-

"Softly the west wind blows,
Gaily the warm sun goes.
The earth her bosom showeth,
And with all sweetness floweth,

"Goes forth the scarlet spring,
Clad with all blossoming,
Sprinkles the fields with flowers,
Leaves on the forest.

"Dens for four-footed things,
Sweet nests for all with wings,
On every blossomed bough,
Joy ringeth now.

“ I see it with my eyes,
I hear it with my ears,
But in my heart are sighs,
And I am full of tears.

"Alone with thought I sit,
And blench, remembering it.
Sometimes I lift my head,
I neither hear nor see.

"Do thou, O Spring most fair,
Squander thy care
On flower and leaf and grain,
Leave me alone with pain."

Latin text in The Cambridge Songs, p. 64, Levis eocsurget
Zephirus.)7 The Cambridge Songs: A Goliard’s Song Book of the Xlth
Century: ed. K . Breul (Cambridge, 1 9 1 5 ) .

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11th Century - A pandemic Poem? (A Song Actually)

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11th Century - A pandemic Poem? (A Song Actually)

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Presentation on 21/01/21

In the Silent Days of the Covid Spring, many of us discovered nature. In the pain of pandemic many of us find comfort in Nature’s beauty. Denied the touch of others, alone and distanced, for many the call of nature is a source of solace, even some of those who break the rules designed to prevent the spread of virus head for the countryside to be for a brief time in touch with nature.

With this Pandemic in the 21st Century singing birds have reminded us of nature. The quieter roads and paths have made us aware of the trees and flowers etc that have always been there, but we have been too engaged with other things to notice.

In times before urban life as we know it and have known it, nature was always there and people often contrasted the woes of life with the wonders of nature. The Covid lockdowns began with a Silent spring and now we are in the midst of Winter - We may ask as Shelley asked “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

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You'll Never Walk Alone
By Karen Rachel Kennedy
As a Scouser, we'll never Walk Alone, but for now we need to stay alone, that has become a Universal message in a short space of time,

Our World was spinning & rotating at a million miles a⁰ minute,
Everybody was in a rush, life was on a fast track,
The quicker the better;

We needed more money, clothes, computers, laptops, iPads, cell phones, sport toys; gadgets galore,
digital adoption was the fastest it has even been;

And now, everything has drastically slowed down,
On one hand to a screeching halt, with social distancing & self-isolation,
On the other side of the coin, it's a race against time, to save People all over the World;

The basic concepts of survival & life are now in Fashion,
For the first time in this Universe, no-one has the answers;

In 50 years time, what will the History Teachers be teaching the Children of the New Age?
How will Mankind be judged in the History Books of tomorrow?

Men & Women who lived through the Second World War, are now saying, today is far worse, living through an unnavigable Apocalyptic Period;

Planet Earth has now changed forever,
How humbling it is to be Human, surrounded by our modern gadgets,
We have to survive & be better to each other,
And must learn the lessons being taught to us now,

We will get through this dark time in our civilisation,
But it will take Everyone around the World, to do their part!
Stay strong & have hope,
We need to keep our dreams alive,
I wish you all a good weekend
& our Spirit will survive!

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REALITY CHECK
BY
KAREN RACHEL KENNEDY
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND, UK

Can you hear the Ocean, crashing to the shore,
The waves role over like the circle of life;

We are in lockdown, but nature continues, oblivious to the struggles of Earth's mighty plight;

Can you hear the birds, singing in the breeze, from inside your window, while you hope you don't sneeze;

A new day has awakened on planet earth,
It's the time of Spring when Nature rebirths,
Animals are born, in the wild & all around,
They're not aware of the nightmare we found;

Surrounding our world, there's nowhere to go, it's covered our Planet, it's continuing to grow,
We have to take stock of what's important to you,
It's not all about money & fame by a few;

Is this how the Dinosaurs, left Planet Earth,
Gasping for breath, their cries left unheard;

Wake up People, please get a clue,
Listen to your Doctors, coz they're right in the stew,
Trying to save lives, endangering their own,
Nurses & Carers, fighting all alone;

While others are oblivious to the plague that's all around, invisible it is, listen to the sound,
of your Government telling you, get into your homes, social distancing does not have to mean, you're all alone;

but you will be if you don't do the right thing, with the rate Covid's growing, it's a terrible thing;

So let's stand together, metaphorically speaking,
From the safety of our home, reach out to each other,
With virtual hugs, conversation, let's pray,
We can all be together in facing today,
And protect the ones we love till Covid goes away!

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Here’s a great seasonal poem to amuse, but also to offer a space to reflect on overwhelm and what we hold on to. Lisa Rossetti.

The Armful

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns --
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

by Robert Frost

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I knocked at that blue door,
In that memorable starry night.
The window was showing me a glow light,
And a warm voice was welcomed me inside.

A calm face with a beautiful smile
Was telling me to sit and warm.
Near the fire where the dreams can fly,
And where my grandma sits to talk.

She talks about the war and peace,
Her voice so strong was like a legend.
She sing a song about the heroes and beliefs,
About the history and soldiers glory.

The guns, the screams, the horses breathings
Were present in that night in our minds,
In our eyes and souls,
In our prayers ... in our spirit.

But wait, I saw a candle light
The room was suddenly so bright!
That was the light of hope and fight,
The light and tribute to the right!

©️Cristina Steliana Mihailovici, #LittleGloby

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The Stare:

She saw it off-boarding the plane in Saigon,
A pouch put in her hand.
Back in her hotel room
Perspiration everywhere.
She remembered the pouch,
Some shrivelled fingers-
A 'Vietnam tradition'
She found out.

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Gift
Leonard Cohen (1961)

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.

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It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity. And when we hear a nightingale, we hear the pause and the rich, piercing rhythm of recollection, the perfect past. The lark may sound sad, but with the lovely lapsing sadness that is almost a swoon of hope. The nightingale's triumph is a pæan, but a death-pæan.

So it is with poetry. Poetry is, as a rule, either the voice of the far future, exquisite and ethereal, or it is the voice of the past, rich, magnificent. When the Greeks heard the Iliad and the Odyssey, they heard their own past calling in their hearts, as men far inland sometimes hear the sea and fall weak with powerful, wonderful regret, nostalgia; or else their own future rippled its time-beats through their blood, as they followed the painful, glamorous progress of the Ithacan. This was Homer to the Greeks: their Past, splendid with battles won and death achieved, and their Future, the magic wandering of Ulysses through the unknown.

With us it is the same. Our birds sing on the horizons. They sing out of the blue, beyond us, or out of the quenched night. They sing at dawn and sunset. Only the poor, shrill, tame canaries whistle while we talk. The wild birds begin before we are awake, or as we drop into dimness, out of waking. Our poets sit by the gateways, some by the east, some by the west. As we arrive and as we go out our hearts surge with response. But whilst we are in the midst of life, we do not hear them.

The poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end must have that exquisite finality, perfection which belongs to all that is far off. It is in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the nature of all that is complete and consummate. The completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end. Perfected bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.

But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. If we try to fix the living tissue, as the biologists fix it with formation, we have only a hardened bit of the past, the bygone life under our observation.

Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves, and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. We look at the very white quick of nascent creation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood, looks round, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. If you tell me about the lotus, tell me of nothing changeless or eternal. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.

Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight, nakedly passing radiance. Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don't give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this very instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative quick.

There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and infinite future. The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting gems of the before and after. In its quivering momentaneity it surpasses the crystalline, pearl-hard jewels, the poems of the eternities. Do not ask for the qualities of the unfading timeless gems. Ask for the whiteness which is the seethe of mud, ask for that incipient putrescence which is the skies falling, ask for the never-pausing, never-ceasing life itself. There must be mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without dénouement or close. There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the forever incalculable journey of creation: everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things.

This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit. Whitman's is the best poetry of this kind. Without beginning and without end, without any base and pediment, it sweeps past forever, like a wind that is forever in passage, and unchainable. Whitman truly looked before and after. But he did not sigh for what is not. The clue to all his utterance lies in the sheer appreciation of the instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very well-head. Eternity is only an abstraction from the actual present. Infinity is only a great reservoir of recollection, or a reservoir of aspiration: man-made. The quivering nimble hour of the present, this is the quick of Time. This is the immanence. The quick of the universe is the pulsating, carnal self, mysterious and palpable. So it is always.

Because Whitman put this into his poetry, we fear him and respect him so profoundly. We should not fear him if he sang only of the "old unhappy far-off things," or of the "wings of the morning." It is because his heart beats with the urgent, insurgent Now, which is even upon us all, that we dread him. He is so near the quick.

From the foregoing it is obvious that the poetry of the instant present cannot have the same body or the same motion as the poetry of the before and after. It can never submit to the same conditions. It is never finished. There is no rhythm which returns upon itself, no serpent of eternity with its tail in its own mouth. There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened.

Much has been written about free verse. But all that can be said, first and last, is that free verse is, or should be direct utterance from the instant, whole man. It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out. They speak all together. There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only belong to the reality, as noise belongs to the plunge of water. It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse, no use drawing a melodic line which all the feet must toe. Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant. Whitman pruned away his clichés-perhaps his clichés of rhythm as well as of phrase. And this is about all we can do, deliberately, with free verse. We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial foam or artificial smoothness. But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm. All the laws we invent or discover-it amounts to pretty much the same-will fail to apply to free verse. They will only apply to some form of restricted, limited unfree verse.

All we can say is that free verse does not have the same nature as restricted verse. It is not of the nature of reminiscence. It is not the past which we treasure in its perfection between our hands. Neither is it the crystal of the perfect future, into which we gaze. Its tide is neither the full, yearning flow of aspiration, nor the sweet, poignant ebb of remembrance and regret. The past and the future are the two great bournes of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected. Finished beauty and measured symmetry belong to the stable, unchanging eternities.

But in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment. To break the lovely form of metrical verse, and to dish up the fragments as a new substance, called vers libre, this is what most of the free-versifiers accomplish. They do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm. It has no goal in either eternity. It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable. None of this. It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.

For such utterance any externally-applied law would be mere shackles and death. The law must come new each time from within. The bird is on the wing in the winds, flexible to every breath, a living spark in the storm, its very flickering depending upon its supreme mutability and power of change. Whence such a bird came: whither it goes: from what solid earth it rose up, and upon what solid earth it will close its wings and settle, this is not the question. This is a question of before and after. Now, now, the bird is on the wing in the winds.

Such is the rare new poetry. One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly recognized: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse: Whitman. Now we know.

The ideal-what is the ideal? A figment. An abstraction. A static abstraction, abstracted from life. It is a fragment of the before or the after. It is a crystallized aspiration, or a crystallized remembrance: crystallized, set, finished. It is a thing set apart, in the great storehouse of eternity, the storehouse of finished things.

We do not speak of things crystallized and set apart. We speak of the instant, the immediate self, the very plasm of the self. We speak also of free verse.

All this should have come as a preface to "Look! We have Come Through." But is it not better to publish a preface long after the book it belongs to has appeared? For then the reader will have had his fair chance with the book, alone.

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The Poetry of the Present by D. H. Lawrence | Poetry Foundation

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It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity. And when we hear a nightingale, we hear the pause and the rich, piercing rhythm of recollection, the perfect past.

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A.H.Maslow

The puzzle  that  I'm  now trying to unravel is suggested  by  the observation  that  the  creative  person,  in  the  inspirational phase  of  the  creative  furor,  loses  his  past  and  his  future  and  lives  only  in  the  moment.  He  is  all  there, totally  immersed,
fascinated  and  absorbed  in  the  present,  in  the  current  situation,  in  the  here-now,  with  the  matter-in-hand.  Or  to  use  a  perfect  phrase  from The  Spinster  by  Sylvia  Ashton-Wamer,  the teacher absorbed  with  a  new  method  of teaching  reading to  her children says, “I am  utterly lost in the present."
This  ability  to  become  '" lost  in  the  present"  seems  to  be   a sine  qua  non  for  creativeness  of  any  kind.  But  also  certain prerequisites  of  creativeness -in  whatever  realm- somehow  have  something to do with this  ability to  become  timeless,  selfless, outside of space,  of society, of history.
It  has  begun  to  appear strongly that this  phenomenon is a diluted,  more  secular,  more  frequent  version  of  the  mystical  experience   that  has  been  described  so  often  as   to  have  become what Huxley called  The  Perennial Philosophy.  In various cultures and  in  various  eras,  it  takes  on  somewhat different  coloration
and yet its essence  is always  recognizable- it  is  the  same.

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From THE OTHER SIDE or SILENCE! THE POET AT THE LIMITS of LANGUAGE By Jerzy Peterkiewicz. LONDON; OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1969

THE SWALLOW ON THE SUNDIAL
[An absorbing new study by Jerzy Peterkiewicz, poet, novelist, and critic, deals with the crisis of the poet who ﬁnds himself at the limits of language and wishes to ‘go beyond the words’. Various solutions are open to him: activism, the cult of experience, a commitment to things, actual or poetic suicide, silence itself’. In examining the meaning of these solutions, the author ranges widely over world literature to provide a profoundly original and thoughtful book.]

‘. . . THE question of being truly in the present concerns the mystic as much as the poet, and over this they both stumble in their search for illuminated silence on the other side of death-wishes, despair, sacriﬁce, and failure. “

‘The poet-prophet deludes himself by trying to trace the contours of the future in the events which mask the present for him; the poet-activist bangs the surface of what is contemporary, hoping to impress himself on the days before they vanish in the noise he is making. Neither the physical suicide nor the suicidal sacriﬁce of one’s art can damage the instinct of self-preservation which maintains life at large. Schopenhauer reminds us that life's own assurance is the will to live and that it has no other form but the continuous present. It was this awareness that brought Schopenhauer to the doors of mystical perception.

‘Kierkegaard tells us that “The poet is the child of eternity, but he lacks the seriousness of eternity”. Coleridge, on the other hand, wants the poet to be that which he himself aspired to be: “No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”
Whether a philosopher or a child of eternity, the poet is conﬁned to the present, of which he must have a heightened awareness in order to remain a poet. But like any human being he cannot bear the present as a continuous flow of events, and prefers to lock himself up in a pattern of time. “We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.” Instead of being opened out, the psyche suffers from the claustrophobia of time with the past and the future closing in and always shifting their barriers.

‘Time defines man’s existential paradox. He is living in the present Without, in fact, seeing the real present whose other name is eternity. Unless “you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”. Children live in the present. Christ alluded to the eternity of the continuous present which the child’s mind totally accepts and then loses. The poet does not leap over death as Coleridge would have us believe, but he does leap over moments in the continuous present which he senses in a manner not unlike that of children. Wordsworth expressed this affinity with childhood when he wrote about the intimations of immortality.

‘The poet then must live in the real present and accept his childlike condition. He may lack the seriousness of eternity about which Kierkegaard speaks, and he may not be one of the little children for whom Christ keeps his kingdom of heaven open. Yet, now more than ever, he has to meet the challenge of the age in the obvious manifestations of the present. They have already affected his range of vision. For the twentieth century is language-conscious, preoccupied with semantics, etymologies, and comparative linguistics. Words are not only studied as entities, but placed again and again in relative contexts; even the verbal ambiguities of poetry seem to be resolvable in the light of their own obscurity.
‘If so much is really known of language as a tool, if all tools are easily manufactured, the poet may well ask himself whether he is becoming redundant, just like some archaic artisan or a tramp tinker, his workshop even smaller than a pack. Perhaps in the end there will be no word. And what is to remain of meaning? Perhaps some microscopic phonemes of utterance, each recordable, each automatically segregated from its  original impulse.

‘As for the range of the poet’s vision, the challenge today comes from space. This is, in fact, a vast vision, being realized in our presence: the workshop of imagination shows its finished products. These are not poetic imaginings, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, stars invoked in nebulous epithets: even the much apostrophized moon after centuries of lyrical ebb and flow has suddenly become tangible. Should the popular fantasies of Outer Space be now considered as the subject of poetry? Or the mountains of the Moon? In the eighteenth century, the age of reason, Collins wrote an ode on “the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland considered as the subject of poetry”.

‘Whatever the new-found Space may do to the poet's imagination and reason, it will certainly open more mystical queries. Here lies the challenge and also the trap. For when the barrier of silence is reached as definitely as it is now, no exclamatory protestations, no wooing of death can release the poet from the apprehension that silence is a clear line on the map of poetry. There may be no words beyond the line, but the absence of words need not mean their death. Perhaps silence stands for survival. '

‘One of the new mystical queries concerns, I think, the affinity between the silence of space at last experienced by man, and the silence within him, into which, as into a prehistoric cave, depth psychology probes, searching for‘ the light on the other side. Myth can be a guide to the past-present, if one wants to see the two unified, but can it still serve as a mediator in the vertical relationship with the cosmic areas outside our global awareness which is bound to shrink anyway, as the other awareness takes possession of our minds?

‘To fall back on any universal pattern of the past would be useless. We can no longer lift up the Chestertonian banner of chivalry: back to the Middle Ages, to the Gothic arches and the dim religious light of stained-glass windows. Nor would we find aesthetic comfort, however small, in some kind of Pre-Rapliaelite revival. The weakness of mystical verse and painting in the nineteenth century was precisely the revivalist tone, the mawkish aﬁirmation which went together with the simultaneous denial of the real present. The pretty Italian features of Christ in devotional pictures were as irrelevant as the genteel raptures over some unearthly beatitude. When Dante wrote that love moved the sun and the other stars, he was also stating a fact which theocentric science  accepted; those who tried to imitate Dante in the nineteenth century could with luck revive the mood but not the science. The intention went awry.

‘Today the poet has more than ever to exercise the two faculties at his disposal: intuition and imagination. Both bring him close to the frontier of words and he learns from the ﬁrst experience of silence that the real present cannot be entered unless it is reached through silence. The crisis, the sacrifice, and the noche oscum occur in the same vertical relationship with that other silence, at which the poet hurls his questions supplications, and abuse. He is never answered, although like Job he believes in the Voice on the inscrutable side of silence.

‘Turning inwards, however, he might find that other side in himself: Perhaps then, and only then, would he astonish his own poetic desire by feeling no need of a voice. All is answered in the negative. Schopenhauer understood mysticism when he said that his system on reaching its highest point ended with a negation.

‘A swallow perched on the gnomon of a sundial balances a paradox over the shadow line which indicates a small measure of time. The line could be extinguished at any moment by the withdrawal of light or by the swallow’s own shadow. But the swallow prefers to be uncapturable, and withdraws into measureless light.’

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THE POETS COME HOME
From THE POETS OF PRAGUE - CZECH POETRY BETWEEN THE WARS. By Alfred French.
LONDON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1969

[The Poets of Prague is a study of Czech poetry between the wars, an account of the various strains that ran side by side: proletarian, surrealist, and ‘pure poetry’. Mr. French’s book, with his own impressive translations, will be attractive to all who are interested in the intellectual history of central Europe]

‘THE international crisis of 1938 called forth in the Czechs an unusual demonstration of national solidarity. It was, as a young poet wrote, the sight of the great storm raging outside the windows and threatening to destroy the house, which brought home to its inmates, as never before, how precious was the light and warmth within. Suddenly abstract ideas like freedom, humanity, and social justice came alive, identified in popular imagination with national interests. Perhaps for the first in its brief history the Czechoslovak State saw men of all social and political affiliations working together for the common salvation. Among artists, men who had been at odds all their lives joined their voices in a common appeal for support to the  international committee of writers. Abandoned by its friends, the State foundered; Czech literature echoed with defiance and anger for the lost cause. France had been for long the Mecca
of Czech artists and the darling of the avant garde; now at last one sided and rather pathetic love affair ended in disillusion and humiliation. Falling out of love with the West, the Czechs turned back upon themselves. “What can you do,” wrote Karel Capek, “it is terribly far from nation to nation: the further we go, the more we are alone. Now better never set foot outside your homeland. Better lock your doors and close your shutters, and let them all do as they like. I no longer care what. ‘The political crisis which briefly closed the ranks, brought home to the Czechs the value of all that bound them together-the shared traditions and the common goals which they had inherited from the past.With the enhanced consciousness of cultural  continuity, poetry, music, art, all acquired a new urgency and a wider appreciation. Like the great bridges of Prague it drew men together, linking past to future, and lending a voice so that the dead could still speak to the living. The dark hour recalled the oldest traditions of the Czech people:

Heard far off are the bells for the peaceful Eve of the Festival.
Through chill evening arises the prayer of the villagers;
And the soul of the Earth is in song; all anguish and faith and sorrow
Are blended in one great hymn, and are soaring
Up to the -skies eternal.

Wenceslas, Holy one,
Do not leave it to die into silence
For ourselves, or for men hereafter.

So at last like venturers sailing home from distant lands the Czech poets returned to the roots of their national culture. The central theme of poetry was the homeland, and its commonest symbol became that of the prodigal son. The theme was worked out in greatest detail by Hora in a poem “jan houslista” (“Jan the Fiddler”), published in I939. The book reads like an autobiographical sketch of Hora’s own artistic odyssey and it is no coincidence that the initials of the title are the poet’s own. A musician Jan, who in his youth had left home to seek better times returns from abroad after many years of exiel. In earlier days he was drawn by the call of distant horizons; now it is home which urgently summons him back. For Jan the road lies backwards not only in space, but also in time: the widower seeks his first sweetheart, the aging artist his lost childhood. But the hour of return is ill-timed; he comes home to a land ﬁlled with uncertainty and tension. And everything is changed from what he remembered: his first love Kate has lost, together with her youth, husband and children. The passage of time, carrying away the familiar landmarks, has divided the former lovers, and they meet as strangers; but as her ﬁngers move over the piano keys, the familiar music awakens forgotten echoes which call them together again:

A black piano. Katy dressed in black
' black hair above her forehead braided high.
So was it that she met her friend come back
after some twenty years had passed them by.
His lamp-lit room seemed darkened to her eye.
“Autumn? Let us not think of that tonight.”

To play. To take all life between one’s hands,
the rosary of sadness, glistening pearls,
the flame that changes into tenfold strands
of sound. To play, and from the mist that swirls
around one-or from nothing-forge a shield,
give substance to the dream, lightness to clay,
voice to the motherland whose lips are sealed
by hapless fate; when that has passed away,
to usher in a new Creation Day. . . .
It was a summer evening. Katy went
to the open window, from the casement leant
and gazed into the silence of the night.

Via memories and dreams, they move back in time from the threatening present to the hopeful past; from winter to spring and the promise of summer. The feeling of home strikes most poignantly at Jan as they walk in the village graveyard. There, surrounded by familiar names, he realizes that now at last he is at home; for what is home but a muster of the familiar dead?

‘From the graves the massed ﬂowers and humming bees are a symbol of life renewed in the eternal cycle of nature-the dead past lives again in present life and future promise. Thus Hora, in the person of Jan, proclaims his faith in time; time no longer the destroyer, but the preserver. As Jan and Kate leave the graveyard, they are besieged by children who beg Jan to play for them. So he takes the fiddle into his hands and plays. Gravely and attentively the children listen to the music, in a ritual as old and  familiar as the movement of trees and the rhythm of the seasons. Art is the medium which links man to man, old life to new, and past to future; crystallizing men’s dreams, and giving meaning to all things.

‘The return of the exile to his home, the poet to his roots, is a poetic allegory which closes a chapter in Czech literary history. To a generation grown old between the wars, the rebellious postures, fanciful styles, and discarded programmes now remained only as symbols of the years in the wilderness: catastrophe had brought them home. In the hard times a small, threatened group must hold fast to that which binds them together-their heritage of history, music, literature-the creations of poets, preserved for a thousand years in the memory of their people.’

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Pandemic Moods (notes and additions) Page 3

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Pandemic Moods (notes and additions) Page 3

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a) 4  Grieving

How do you feel, loved one gone, loved one lost
The tears and aching of the heart, such a cost
No one can know how you feel the grief is yours
I can know my own grief but never yours
Memories, precious treasures to hold
Whilst you bear the pain, being bold

Saw the grave stones, the much missed
Father, son, daughter, mother
Uncle, aunt, sister, brother
And the grandparent you cared for
Right up to the end
Oh dear close  friend
Love of the life
Just come to an end

b) Page 3
Supposing - A Pledge

Supposing that
This day bound by a pledge
A pledge that binds us all
Not the language it’s said
A pledge that binds, a call
Supposing a
Pledge that you could be me
And then I could be you
With all humanity
A pledge sworn should be true

c) We can only know the pain of others through our own pain - each person can only experience there own tragedies and triumphs, no one can experience them for them - empathy in some ways comes from comes from relating one’s own experience to understand how and what another individual another person feels inside.

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Was from February’s morning frost
Through all those hazy twilight Spring days
A time I was never ever lost
On those mountain paths and ways

The high summer days of blazing sun
There watching valleys, flung far and wide
Then sometimes it seemed like time to run
But life’s begun again, my heart cries

It was in the path of the night storm
The crying timbers would creak and moan
Snuggle tight, my thoughts so calm and warm
Passing winds, my rest peaceful while alone

And all the trees above me as I walk
Ascending those mountain paths and ways
Roman laid tracks, almost hear them talk
View all around, dream of ancient days.

Alec Taylor 2020

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Pandemic Moods (notes and additions) Page 2 - poems: 2) & 3)

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Pandemic Moods (notes and additions) Page 2 - poems: 2) & 3)

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a)  2
The streets are empty
Traffic has stopped
Not a sound anywhere
No one has shopped

There is always a songbird
Always sings but is rarely heard
Listen the birds are singing
As they do all the time
In our silence they are bringing
A sense to our rhyme

b) Page 2
Lock Down - The Birds Are Singing

Lock down lockjaw
A silence has begun
Then the birds are singing
Under the sun

Lock down lockjaw
Alone, not the only one
But the birds are singing
Under the sun

Lock down lockjaw
Different kind of fun
There the birds are singing
Under the sun

Lock down lockjaw
Sports - nobody has won
Ah! the birds are singing
Under the sun

c)  Pandemic starts - everything grinds to a halt - it seems quiet but nature says No! Birdsong- no longer do birds compete with human noise - the traffic of busy town and city centres silenced - birds sing as though to celebrate. People discover nature in sweet song and fresh breeze.

a) 3
You talk to yourself
The room is growing small
And the senses within you
Have builded a wall
You map out a journey
Tour of mind, see a waterfall
You dream the open meadow
So deep, how this mind can enthrall
Walk up some mountain
Oh it’s there so tall
A bang of some distant door
Oh awake, you’re not there at al
Where were you again
Not a signpost - nothing at all.

b) Page 2
Lost For Sure

Look out of the window
Open the door
Where’s all the fresh air gone
Can’t breathe no more

So walk up the mountain
Go on a tour
Where have the sign posts gone
I’m lost for sure.

c) Relative isolation you travel within your mind - lose yourself in the journey a dream that’s almost real- Ah but how fragile it is one noise of distraction and you are lost - you return to the isolated world of pandemic

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Pandemic Moods (notes and additions) Page 1

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Pandemic Moods (notes and additions) Page 1

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Order of work

a) Additional verse/poem
b) Relevant Poem from Pandemic - Moods
c) Notes

a)  1)
Sleepless nights
Tired Days
Turned out lights
In a daze

b)  Page 1
Have tides turned
Since I last slept
Has joy returned
Since I last wept

c)The Prelude

A personal statement - “before the storm” - before the pandemic was another crisis for me.  Pandemic then is a Crisis on top of a crisis.

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A gentle moment, thoughts drift

As passing life becomes such a rift

And the stormy water swish air

And rocks crash in despair

Oh the crumble, crumble sand

Beneath the feet on which we stand

And now its a kind of solitude

Or lonely in a crowd

Now all the empty streets

The music ain't so loud

But the noise in your head

Ears talking to the brain

Tell the deaf-man he's not dead

Changing world

Always the same

Gentle moment, thoughts still drift

Passing life so slow then so swift

Stormy winds you face the air

Hold back the rocks and the despair

Oh so humble, hold firm stand

After each leap somewhere to land

Alec Taylor 2020

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A gentle moment, thoughts drift

As passing life becomes such a rift

And the stormy water swish air

And rocks crash in despair

Oh the crumble, crumble sand

Beneath the feet on which we stand

And now its a kind of solitude

Or lonely in a crowd

Now all the empty streets

The music ain't so loud

But the noise in your head

Ears talking to the brain

Tell the deaf-man he's not dead

Changing world

Always the same

Gentle moment, thoughts still drift

Passing life so slow then so swift

Stormy winds you face the air

Hold back the rocks and the despair

Oh so humble, hold firm stand

After each leap somewhere to land

Alec Taylor 2020

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Solitude or Solitary Poetry In The Pandemic - Alec Taylor Aug 14 2020

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Solitude or Solitary Poetry In The Pandemic - Alec Taylor Aug 14 2020

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Some Quotes poems etc. May not use them all in presentation - but gives an opportunity to view some of the Material I have used.

First Hermann Hesse:
Herman Hesse - Seasons Of The Soul
Quotes

“Every book is an adventure of the mind and an invitation to experience the gifts of imagination”

“Today I am more aware than ever that I stand alone in my role as a “dreamer.” I an conscious of this fact and see it not only as a curse, but an appointed office .... I am neither a minister nor a  therapist and I act without authority or entitlement, but I strengthen each and every individual  to the extent I am able to understand him, in those aspects which distinguish him from the norm, I try to show him the meanings of his uniqueness.”

“ In the end all art and especially poetry has only a raison d’êntre if it offers more than entertainment, but has a direct effect on life, provides solace, clarification, counsel, aid and fortification in life’s struggles and helps overcome what is difficult in life.”

“Great poets feel into the future with most sensitive antennas and live out ahead of us a piece of future development, a yet unrealized potential. Poets and philosophers, if they do not sell out to please, but have the courage to be themselves, represent the most precious and dangerous models a culture can have. They don’t supply a ready made set of duties and doctrines to be followed, but they show and teach the the opposite: the path to individuality and personal conscience.”

Poetry and music invite you
to understand the splendors of creation.
A look into the mirror will confirm it.
What disturbs us often as disjointed
becomes clear and simple in a poem:
Flowers start laughing, the clouds release their rain,
the world regains its soul, and silence speaks.
==========================

When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,

a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief

in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Source: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)
=======================

Solitude (some verses) John Clare

Now as even’s warning bell

Rings the day’s departing knell,

Leaving me from labour free,

Solitude, I’ll walk with thee:

Solitude! I love thee well,
Brushing through the wilder’d dell,
Picking from the ramping grass

Nameless blossoms as I pass,

All this when there my eyes behold
On every stone and heap of mould,

Solitude, though thou art sweet,

Solemn art thou then to meet;

O here’s thy comfort, Solitude,

When overpowering woes intrude!

Then thy sad, thy solemn dress

Owns the balm my soul to bless:

Here I judge the world aright;

Here see vain man in his true light;

Learn patience, in this trying hour,

To gild life’s brambles with a flower;

Take pattern from the hints thou’st given,

And follow in thy steps to heaven.

===================
Emptiness

I've learned mine can't be filled,

only alchemized. Many times

it's become a paragraph or a page.

But usually I've hidden it,

not knowing until too late

how enormous it grows in its dark.

Or how obvious it gets

when I've donned, say, my good

cordovans and my fine tweed vest

and walked into a room with a smile.

I might as well have been a man

with a fez and a faux silver cane.

Better, I know now, to dress it plain,

to say out loud

to some right person

in some right place

that there's something not there

in me, something I can't name.

That some right person

has just lit a fire under the kettle.

She hasn't said a word.

Beneath her blue shawl

she, too, conceals a world.

But she's been amazed

how much I seem to need my emptiness,

amazed I won't let it go.

Spike Milligan

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Lockdown poem

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Sent by Alec:

I Am!

By John Clare

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

The End of Poetryby Ada LimónEnough of osseous and chickadee and sunflowerand snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecyand the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tisof thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and godnot forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,enough of the will to go on and not go on or howa certain light does a certain thing, enoughof the kneeling and the rising and the lookinginward and the looking up, enough of the gun,the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lostletter on the dresser, enough of the longing andthe ego and the obliteration of ego, enoughof the mother and the child and the father and the childand enough of the pointing to the world, wearyand desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enoughI am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,enough of the animal saving me, enough of the highwater, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,I am asking you to touch me.Ada Limón, “The End of Poetry.” Published in the New Yorker. May 4, 2020.