Giving the Peace

Sitting next to me in the pew there was somebody new in church today. She wasn't new to me.We had met before, a long time ago and since lost touch with each other. It was great to make contact again. It's a lovely congregation isn't it" she said and this made me see my parish church afresh. How it is a place where there is so much love, where every one is made welcome, where when we are invited to say"Peace be with you," to one another, everyone around me gives me hugs and kisses. It made me think about why I attend every Sunday, why in this mixed "rainbow" congregation  I have a feeling of belonging that I do not have anywhere else.

It also made me realise why, in spite of the doubts that often plague me, I am a Christian and have been for most of my life. I see how this wonderful faith, a faith base on love, has inspired ordinary people . My devout parents dedicated their lives to helping others. Seated around me during this service are numbers of people doing unselfish loving things. One regularly visits prisons, another provides sandwiches for the poor, another has fought tirelessly for justice in this country. I could go on and on.

If I am deluded, as my atheist friends tell me,I decide, that deluded is what I wish to continue to be.

In praise of MOOCs

Having just finished an Online Astronomy course called Orion in the night Sky. I started another one, this time simply called Moons.  "Orion" was stimulating and exciting: Moons is  astonishing, amazing, fabulous and any other superlatives you can think of. It is, I am afraid,a little too much for me. I  really need to do it all over again.  There is just so much information to process. Astronomy is all very new to me. All I knew about Moons is what I learnt more than sixty years ago in School Geography class. I became interested in stars when I joined a U3A tour to Sutherland to see the SALT telescope. I meant to read up more about the subject, but only when I had become a bit bored after finishing a poetry course and having time to spare,did I look up other possible courses on the Internet and found these two on Futurelearn.  These courses are run by the Open University and they are excellent. The material is well presented and easy to read and as for the illustrations... I can only say WOW. They comprise wonderful pictures from NASA taken on different space probes. These are quite spectacular!

Some more poems

JUST A LITTLE TIME

When you are old, time gets out of hand.

Like water in a muddy dam, its sluice gates open

to spew out effluent cascades.  Your feeble fingers

can’t stem the flow. Brown clouds of days

rush past. You clutch at them,

but as you try to keep them back

they twist and swirl away,

turn into weeks and then to years.

Until all that is left is

a shrunken puddle

on a sandy floor.

THE SCENT OF ROSEMARY

The bitter scent of rosemary 

calls to me from the bush

that once grew by the door.

of a house full of girl-children, set

in a garden with a daisy-bordered lawn

and a cypress tree. .

Round-faced Dalena  kept floors polished

and windows clean. Old Soppy tended

flowerbeds and sold my green beans on the sly.

Now −

both in their graves, the lawn paved over

and the cypress tree chopped down.

CAROL SINGING IN AN OLD AGE COMPLEX

As the moon, one day from full, stares pale

through clumps of cirrus cloud,

we bring our candles and our hymn sheets,

and gather at the gate to start

our pilgrimage around the cottages.

A singer in a motor-wheelchair leads the way

and bringing up the rear, another singer

leans on a walker.

Our choirmaster gives the note

and off we go. We stumble into “Bethlehem.”

Our voices tremble on the damp night air

then swell. Sound spreads, doors open,

hands wave out of windows.

Soft drizzle sparkles in our hair.

We visit all the units

one by one.

Legs weary, breath a little short,

song starts to peter out, and then a woman,

surprised at hearing music by her door

comes out and looks confusedly about.

Through fog that fills her aging brain, recalls

something she first learnt at her mother’s knee and

joyfully, joins in with sweet soprano  Stille nacht,

Silent Night, Holy night

LEARNING ABOUT ORION

(After studying an online astronomy course)

In the constellation of Orion

somewhere halfway between

Red giant Betelgeuse

and White giant Rigel, lies

Orion Nebula, a fuzzy place,

where stars are born.

As Orion sweeps across the sky,

his hunting dogs beside him,

chasing the Pleiades, bow at the ready,

he carries below his belt the seeds

of suns. They swirl in multi-coloured clouds

of purple, yellow, green and blue.

In the wide disc which gathers round

a sphere that will become a new young sun,

are bits of debris, which, with dust

and ashes from celestial conflagrations

might form, after a million years

another Earth like ours

 

THE FUNERAL

I get there early to secure a seat.

The coffin is already there and the churchwarden

The coffin wears an outsized wreath

The warden, wears a white shirt and a tie

I kneel and say a prayer

A lay minister in a robe walks down the aisle

Women from the old age home take up their seats.

some people come in at the vestry door

I read the Service Order leaflet.

The lay minster blows in the mic

He shakes it to and fro and blows again.

Some people come to sit in the front pews

I read the book of Job in the Pew Bible

A child toddles up and down the aisle

The wind blows the altar candles out

The verger lights them all again.

I finish Job and start on Proverbs

The priest comes in and puts notes on the lectern

 He looks around and then walks out again.

The warden makes announcements I can’t hear

I finish Proverbs and begin The Psalms

The last of the pallbearers has arrived

They hoist the coffin skew; its wreath falls off

The verger picks it up and puts it back

The organ breaks into the March from Saul.

And now the service can begin.

WORDS FAIL ME.

Numbers were always unreliable.

ID, cell phone, credit card, the only ones

that ever stayed embedded in my brain

and as for names − many have long refused

to be attached to faces,

but now words, once dependable,

my very tools-of-trade,

are turning traitor.

It was the long ones started the rebellion,

the crossword puzzle ones – palaeontology,

Manichaeism, spectroscopy, all

went AWOL when I needed them.

Soon everyday ones joined the fun,

hiding under beds and behind cupboards,

having to be winkled out with

rakes and broom-handles.

Some, I believe, have gone for good.

They went and hid in luggage trunks

or old ice-chests and to make sure

I wouldn’t find them there,

they closed the lids down very tight.

And then they couldn’t open them and so

they suffocated –

serve them right!

Two poems

MOONBEAMS

“Moonbeams, sadly, will not survive in a jar.”

Roger Mc Gough

Dark shadows will chase sunlight

from a windowsill. Rainbows

have no anchors and they float away

Fires consume dry grass, turn bush to ash.

Plucked flowers lose their petals one by one.

But stars, long dead can still shine on.

Their rays, far from their source speed through space

to reach us as we stand here in the night,
hold hands and look up at the sky

 

PORTRAIT IN THREAD

I look across my room to where

a new embroidered picture hangs,

a picture of a girl, dark-skinned, red-lipped

head held in tattooed hands.

Coloured threads

laid down like painted brush-marks

show her sorrow.

Stitched into the cloth I see

exquisitely expressed,

the compass of her pain.

And I see

Another girl, blond head

bent over wooden frame. She holds

in delicate fingers a sharp shiny needle

and stabs into a canvas cloth

over and over again.

More on modern Poetry

My attention was drawnrecently to an article about poetry. Two poets were mentioned, Goldsmith and Prynne and I looked them up.  These poets were apparently considered very important and influential. Examples of their poems were supplied by Google. One of the poems (I think the author was Goldsmith) was made up of of every sentence in a particular issue of a newspaper written down one below the other. Apparently this is some kind of experimental writing and, I think, is known as unoriginality.  Prynne's poems did look more like poems. They were written in stanzas. The lines were fairly even. They sounded pleasant when read aloud. But I after reading one of them several times carefully, I still had not the faintest idea what it was about.

Now, I am quite ready to accept that my lack of appreciation is due to inadequacies in my knowledge or my understanding, but I am sure that the average reader (not very many of them these days) who chooses to read poetry would feel the same. What is the audience for this sort of modern poetry. Obviously academics teaching and studying modern literature must read them, but who else enjoys them?

Nearly all my friends and acquaintances, when I mention Poetry will immediately tell me that they never read poetry and that poetry is something that they don't understand. I think all this obscure kind of modern poetry is to blame Most people these days  view poems as though they are not to be read for enjoyment, but are like cryptic crossword puzzle clues that have to be dissected and pulled apart. This is the usual attitude in this country towards written poetry. And it is a pity.

Performance poetry, on the other hand is becoming very popular. There are more and more events for Praise Poets and Slam Poets. Hopefully this popularity will spill over to poems that can be read as well as listened to.

Stars

I am studying a short online course on Astronomy. It  is called "In the night Sky Orion" and I assumed that it would be only about that constellation, but it goes much deeper and wider than that.
We are introduced to the classification of different kinds of stars as well as different kinds of galaxies. We are told about black holes, dark matter and dark energy, We find out about the Big Bang Theory and the possible end of the Universe.

Learning about the Universe is both stimulating and daunting.  Although it is intended to be a very basic course, a lot of the more technical stuff is not all that easy to grasp and the huge size of the enormous distances and the length of the time involved is almost impossible for me to get my mind around.

I am enjoying the whole course, but one of the best parts is going out at the same time each night and observing Orion. We are supposed to take a photo of Orion once a week, but this is beyond me. Either my camera is not good enough or I am not using it properly, but all I get is a black space. So I just stand and stare at this group of stars in the sky and it is very beautiful. Although I haven't been able to get pictures of Orion  have been able to see that Orion has moved (relative to the earth, not the other stars) and is further overhead than when I started observations three weeks ago.

My Poem about Orion

LEARNING ABOUT ORION

In the constellation of Orion

somewhere halfway between

Red giant Betelgeuse

and White giant Rigel, lies

Orion Nebula, a fuzzy place, a womb

where stars are born.

As Orion sweeps across the sky,

his hunting dogs beside him,

chasing the Pleiedes, bow at the ready,

he carries below his belt the seeds

of suns. They swirl in multi-coloured clouds

of purple, yellow, green and blue.

In the wide disc which gathers round

a sphere that will become a new young sun,

are bits of debris, which, with dust

and ashes from celestial conflagrations

might form, after a million years

another Earth like ours

Name a constellation

Here is a drawing of the constellation The Aardvark.  I downloaded the picture of the stars, made a tracing and then did the not very artistic drawing.

THE STORY OF THE AARDVARK

Kalulu the rabbit was speaking to King Lion. "O Great King," he said. "All the kings on this earth have beautiful palaces to live in, but you, one of the greatest of them all, still sleep under a scrubby thorn tree.  Why don't you have a palace built to show your subjects how great you are?"
"Who can I get to build me a palace?" asked King Lion.

"The ants are the best builders, " said Kalulu. "Just look at that big ant hill they have built. Shall I ask them to build a palace for you."
"Yes," said the king. "Tell them to build a palace fit for the King of all the Beasts." and he shook his black mane and gave a roar to show what a great king he was.
So Kalulu the rabbit ran off and informed the ants that  King Lion had ordered them to build him a new home and the ants called all their friends and relations together and  started to build at once.
 Aardvark heard King Loin roaring. He went to see what was going on.  When he saw lines and lines of ants streaming to the place where the palace was to be built, he drooled with joy. He unrolled his long tongue and gobbled up all the ants. When King Lion came to inspect the site of his palace, he saw no building at all.
"What is the meaning of this, " he asked Kalulu.
""Please, O Great King," said Kalulu. " It is the aardvark's fault.. He has eaten all the ants that were going to build your palace."
King Lion was very angry. He grabbed  Aardvark by his tail and flung him high up into the sky. And there Aardvark is still. you can see him at night trying to gobble up the stars.