What to do About Mrs Houston

Is she the better part of me,
Like valour, the discretion
And if that' s so, how can it be?
What benefit repression?
Though valour isn't Ali' s thing
She just likes having fun;
Mrs H. must always bring
A cloud to hide the sun.
And quench the flames of silliness
With sober, grown up thought
And cool things down with chilliness,
Or, as a last resort,
Switch Ali off, keep her inside,
Imprisoned for weeks on end,
And make her cower down and hide,
And never recommend
Her for parole; its always her decision,
But when at last
She' s free again, then Ali goes doolally
And makes herself a target for general derision.
So in steps Mrs Houston,
Who calms things down and yet,
She's never really beaten Ali:
At least she hasn' t yet.

On Looking at my Mother's First High School Photograph 1937.(Rondeau)

Her eyes in frozen sepia still
Express such searching, and her will
To seek me out, to understand
To sympathise, is clear.  As planned
The faded shade and light fulfil
Their strange and wondrous role: distil
The essence of the soul and spill
It out upon the card, command,
In frozen sepia
And gentleness, response; until
I have to look away, to kill
The tightness in my chest, demand
No tears, and take myself in hand.
This wise, kind child's my mother, still,
In frozen sepia.

'It is Only a Very Shallow Person Who Does Not Judge By Appearances' Oscar Wilde

Your eyes, which are your soul,
Made manifest, unfathomable,
Defying scientific explanation;
Express in pools of blue or brown,
Round, moist with brilliance,
And fragments of reflected light,
Your very essence:  your whole.
To find a gaze impenetrable
Is merely to avoid confrontation,
There is no fleeting thought so quickly flown,
That leaves no evidence
Of its flight,
No trace residual in the coal
Black depths of pupils. For each inimitable,
Unique and transient manifestation
Of thought is known,
Finding its mirror in the onlooker, whose excellence,
Whose skill in guessing right
Your emotion, is illimitable.
And thus your eyes are by definition
The second person singular, a pronoun
Made physical in the face, speaking in silence
The language of consciousness: insight.

Harpsichord

Jangling tunefully under my bed,
The sound rising up
Through the old deal floor,
Filling, persistently, my head,
With harmony

Spelled out by plucked gut and brass,
The reason of some ancient season 
Speaking not to the soul
As the Erard and Broadwood,
Not affecting, a lunar like pull
On the whole tide of emotion,
But appealing to order,
And understood by some
Instinct known to Pythagoras.

Rameau, Scarlatti, Daquin,
Handel, Bach and Couperin
Providing energy, brilliance,
Commotion, and a joyful demonstration
Of the power of rationality,
Precision, joy, vitality, glittering elegance,
Consisting of and insisting on intelligence.

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A Memory

September, as I remember it from childhood,

Was the scrunching of beech leaves in the wood,

Among the skeleton bluebell stalks that stood

Bleached like sun-drenched, ancient bones, by filtered light.

From May to August under pale-green canopy

We played and sheltered from the summer rain, not quite

Aware that autumn always came again, its mood

As fickle as the friends we made at school.  One year

The rain was endless and the streams began to flood,

Carrying tides of foam as if they ran with ale.

And in Assembly in the vast and woody hall,

We learnt 'To be a Pilgrim' and I understood,

Somehow with new appreciation, the idea

Of fitted words and music, all bound up as one

Convenient package, to take out and get undone

At will, beside the scummy stream and in the mud.

Guardian Angel?

I felt your presence first and knew your purpose,
You did not need to speak, just filled my soul,
My heart, my mind with understanding,
The sense that death was fast approaching,
That my mother's life was near its end.
There was no rush of fear, no apprehension,
No ecstasy, no great elation,
Just deepest peace and total comprehension
Beyond any desire to comprehend.
And then it seemed the sky split open
And in the silver sliver like a migraine
In the space, the tear, the rend
Between the sky and light and air
Was confirmation,
A certainty of God's existence,
Unnecessary, for resistance
Was not within my scope of action.

And then you waited at my shoulder
At my left hand in the kitchen,
Beyond the moment of acceptance,
Like a doctor with a patient
Until you knew it safe to leave me,
When you became the chiaroscuro
Reassuring shadow of a friend.

Third of September 2014, (another beheading of a hostage by a British Jihadist, David Cameron seeming to think the most pressing problem is Putin's 'Hitler-like' intentions towards Ukraine, meanwhile nothing being done about the rape of 1400 white girls by Muslim men in Rotherham)

"In describing the vacillation and incompetence of the government during the reign of Ethelred Unraed, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that when the enemy was in the east then our levies were mustered in the west, and when they were in the south then our levies were in the north, and that whatever course of action was decided upon it was not followed even for a single month."

From a comment on the Telegraph blogs by one "The Real PM".

The enemy was violent in the east,
And so we wagered war towards the north.
And next we closed our minds and almost ceased
To notice inhumanity; poured forth
A worthless propaganda to drum up
Support for causing further bloodshed when
Ceasefire had just then been agreed.My cup
Of absolute contempt runs over. Men
Will vacillate, and dither else cause harm
By pointless interference; then ignore
The consequences of their actions,  arm
Guerillas, condemn self defence... Yet war
Against the enemy within's forbidden,
"Lets kick over the traces, keep things hidden!"