The Sunday Posts 2015/ If I could

If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.

If I could speak words of water,
You would drown when I said
"I love you."

Spike Milligan
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts/ Laws of God and Man

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.      

A.E. Houseman
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts2015/ Passing Love

Because you are to me a song.
I must not sing you over- long.
Because you are to me a prayer
I cannot say you everywhere.
Because you are to me a rose-
You will not stay when summer goes.

Langston Hughes.
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts 2013/Minstrel man

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die?      

Langston Hughes
Photo by Alistair.

The Sunday Posts 2015/ On Polling Day

Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We'll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!

excerpt from 'L'Internationale'
By Eugene Poltier