A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

Bids His Beloved Be At Peace (W.B. Yeats)

I HEAR the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:
O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

Honest Hands Build True



Old Cottage in Oranmore – built with peasent hands, with no engineers, its was build true: and stands where many houses designed and built by engineers has fallen…

Honest hands build walls true:
Work plain for all to see –
Stands the test of time,
Passed by walkers like me

Stones on ground, set into the earth
Walls of mud moulded by hands built high
Stand where many concrete walls have bit the dust
Honest hands being the reason why.

As these walls have stood let your actions be
They build your name – let it be true
Let your memory be as these walls stand today
Strong, proud, beautiful, as if new!

Read more from Tomás:

* The Three Eves

* Magpies

* Seek the Distant Isle

* Drinking to the Health of a Crazed Genius

Here's one to begin the day!

From the Death by Water section of The Wasteland.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

I don't read much poetry these days but stumbled across this on Twitter. It's by a poet named Charles Tomlinson who sadly died the other day. I would often find myself mesmerised by planes streaking overhead so I love the imagery in this.

Tonight

Tonight the sky stands cleansed
Of all its trails save one that, slowly,
Before the dark comes on - dissolving
From wrack to wraith - lets through
A high transparency. I wait beneath
This no-man's territory to see
How far that fringe of vapour can prolong
Its fading signature against space -
Space spreading upwards among shadow
Whose steady seepage has now gained
The ground we are standing on. I grip
With the eye that last dissolution in the sky
And pace the isthmus of the darkness under
A solidity of trunks that wait to bear
The leaf-crowns of another year
Penetrating earth, preparing to drink light,
Upright across their tilted hemisphere.

Consolation

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

Wislawa Szymborska

Seven dog-days we let pass
Naming Queens in Glenmacnass,
All the rare and royal names
Wormy sheepskin yet retains,
Etain, Helen, Maeve, and Fand,
Golden Deirdre's tender hand,
Bert, the big-foot, sung by Villon,
Cassandra, Ronsard found in Lyon.
Queens of Sheba, Meath and Connaught,
Coifed with crown, or gaudy bonnet,
Queens whose finger once did stir men,
Queens were eaten of fleas and vermin,
Queens men drew like Monna Lisa,
Or slew with drugs in Rome and Pisa,
We named Lucrezia Crivelli,
And Titian's lady with amber belly,
Queens acquainted in learned sin,
Jane of Jewry's slender shin:
Queens who cut the bogs of Glanna,
Judith of Scripture, and Gloriana,
Queens who wasted the East by proxy,
Or drove the ass-cart, a tinker's doxy,
Yet these are rotten — I ask their pardon —
And we've the sun on rock and garden,
These are rotten, so you're the Queen
Of all the living, or have been.

Queens By J.M.Synge

It was the greatest love for earth that God has ever shown
It was the greatest love unknowing that mankind has ever known

The awaited Christ child was born in Bethlehem to a girl of fifteen years
In a humble manger, within a stable, over which a star appears

No room found among Josephs people, we are told in the story as “the inn”
As cruel pride closed and hardened their hearts, a single mother not welcome within

Two thousand years had passed nearly, still all knowing mankind still has not learned
The message of love and humility, this was a lesson God so yearned

Mankind to learn that no birth is sinful, in no birth at all is there shame
Even borne to another than the mothers man, for that’s how Jesus came

Once upon a time in an Irish town, a girl walked her own Calvary
Through a village of Josephs people where all with eyes looking yet none could see

A mere child was with child, we know not as she walked that hill if she shed tears
Or held them back from all with a quiet dignity, this child of Mary’s years

To seek solace in the grotto neath the church on the Moate she went alone
Lay down to give birth to her son, no manger to lay him in, on cold stone,

He died not on a cross between two thieves, but in her arms, there he died
In the space of a few hours a modern day Christ was born there, and crucified

No cattle’s breath to warm him, no wise men arrived with gifts for him to bear
His mother sought solace from the Virgin Mary, why by grace led her there

We know not did she pray, or did she curse God and the world and all
If she did, God understood, as good as any prayer this He would call

The consequences of mankinds closed minds and pride and gossiping tongues
Its as if the Pharissees again upon the cross Christ again was hung

Josephs people live among us, they run to church and pray
Look down on single mothers, being ignorant to this very day.

Glossary:

Joseph’s people: The story of the inn in the bible is a version of the story, the original being that Joseph and Mary went to family who on seeing she was with child and knowing they were not married politley said there was no room. To this day people look down on single mothers, and a lot who choose abortion do it to hide family shame, a shame caused by an element who call themselves pro life, but are in fact the cause of more abortions than they realise.

Apologists take this analysis and turn it to ensure this aspect is hidden, pointing out hospitality tradition would never be broken – one example is here but careful reading and understanding that Jewish taboos and modern day Christian taboos are much the same thing, and the story of how Jospeh was not the father but was standing by Mary would not have got a good reception from his relatives, no more than it would have in small town Ireland in the last few decades.

Jewish taboos and traditions on sex within and without of marraige can be read here >>>



For all that is wrong with the world, that thinking at last is changing, and while some despair at free love and promiscuity, there is more Christian thinking now among the youth then there ever was in the lat 2000 years.

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On a lighter note, for the season thats in it...

Bad Santa

Santa XXX

Christmas Eve at the Hospital