Today's poet

[stevefoster]

Indeed. I would love to be able to see just how good a soldiering unit the Spartans were if i had a time machine. All those years of training and the intensity of it. Only the best getting through it a good number dying in the 13 years.

I remember watching 300 Spartans (the old film) when i was a nipper, in fact it was on the other day, and reinacting the battle in my back garden with plastic soldiers (bloody cocker spaniel we had at the time ruined it by chewing half of em to death) always been fascinated by ancient armies. The Romans had to march 50 miles in a day as part of their training, they probably did a Bob Graham before Bob himself.
Great poem Matt, good job there was no long-eared, golden cocky spanish girls like our Cindy in Spartan times

[Nathaniel Lee]

How about these for training Merry.http://www.musclepowershop.com/2009/...n-warrior.html
and also http://www.moviecritic.com.au/the-30...rom-gym-jones/ and you too can be a spartan warrior.

[stevefoster]

How about these for training Merry.http://www.musclepowershop.com/2009/...n-warrior.html
and also http://www.moviecritic.com.au/the-30...rom-gym-jones/ and you too can be a spartan warrior.

Impressive, but i think i'll 'doggedly' stick to my diet of Chappie and Bonio's and i have to say.....
'GO TELL THE SPANIELS'

[Nathaniel Lee]

I particularly like the doing all your running sessions with a man on your back. So what are we saying 75-80kg. Imagine Hill reps with that.

[stevefoster]

I particularly like the doing all your running sessions with a man on your back. So what are we saying 75-80kg. Imagine Hill reps with that.

Imagination is easier on the knees Matt.
Man on my back,
Up then down,
Poetry in slow motion!

[Nathaniel Lee]

Hey Merry. How do mexicans keep warm at night ?.

[Hes]

Hi Alf, this is a case of syncronicity for me as I ead this in a book of women poets just the other night and thought it was amazing. So sad but really thought provoking. Thanks for posting it!

I think I have posted a poem of Gwendolyn Brooks before. This one is strong stuff.


The Mother


Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

Gwendolyn Brooks

[Hes]

A friend just emailed me this and I remembered it from school. Its also thought provoling I reckon:

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll moulder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir

[Hes]

running in rhythm
a bluebell sea our reward
as we crest the hill

[Alf]

is this about forbidden fruit?

To Be In Love

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there_
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

Gwendolyn Brooks

I was thinking along the lines of "undeclared fruit" but "forbidden fruit" is much more interesting freckle