Passover - a hope for peace

The sun has risen on the third day of Passover. The Seder nights are done - but not forgotten. It's the traditional Passover meal when we sit round the table with family and friends, tell the story from Exodus and eat a lovely meal together. We remember the Israelites who were made to work as slaves, suffering at the hands of Pharoah. We also remember the Egyptians because they too were suffering. Pharoah had hardened his heart to the pleading from Moses to let the Israelites go, so the Egyptian people had to suffer the ten plagues.

The following is a well worn moan of mine but I make no apologies for repeating it:

It would be good to think that by retelling the story each year, people would no longer have to suffer, either at the hands of other people or from modern-day plagues but this is not the case. Humans seem to be able to justify causing untold pain and misery to other humans. I don't understand it.

And then there are the plagues, the many illnesses that we still have no cure for and, even worse, those that we do have a cure for but the people suffering from them are too poor to pay for the medicines or they have no access to clean water...

I could go on but it won't change the facts and so instead I'll wish you a happy Passover/Easter and hope that some time soon our newspapers can be filled with news about people not killing each other.

Learning Poetry by Heart

The other day, Giles Brandreth was talking on BBC Radio 2 about the values of learning poetry by heart. Not only does it help children to learn, it also helps stave off dementia. Quoting poems by heart is certainly a satisfying experience. The science bit of the programme explained why. It would seem that acoustic statistics are aligned with each other when you speak poetry and that's why it feels right to the brain. I suspect that song lyrics have the same effect.

As I've often said on this blog, my head is full of song lyrics. There's an entire section of my brain given over to their storage. (I know it doesn't really work like that but it's how I think of it.) There is also a section that stores my favourite poems. I once learnt a nonsense poem by Gelette Burgess and it seems to have taken up permanent residence in my memory:

I never saw a purple cow,

I never hope to see one;

but I can tell you, anyhow,

I'd rather see than be one.

There are many others that I learnt by heart years ago. A. A. Milne's poems I've blogged about before, including my ultimate favourite by A. A. Milne:

There once was a dormouse who lived in a bed
of delphiniums blue and geraniums red...

I have, on my book shelves, a very old poetry book by Thomas Hood that I treasured as a child. My favourite poem from that book is still:

I remember, I remember
the house where I was born,
the little window where the sun
came peeping in at morn...

Magical stuff!

I never think to learn poems these days, but according to Radio's Giles Brandreth this is precisely the time in my life when I should be learning. He talked of Dame Sybil Thorndike who memorised a poem a day right into her nineties. This, he said, was 'to keep her mind alive'. I want to keep my mind alive so I'm going to do the same. I'll start by learning a poem a week and I'll report back here next month with my list of achievements... if I remember (Sorry, for that corny and predictable quip!)

All I need to do now is to select a poem for my first week of learning. Any suggestions?

White Out

The thing I love about writing poetry is that nothing is wrong, anything goes, and the words can be interpreted to say what you want them to say. This may be a poem about walking through a blizzard - or it may be about something else entirely.

Walking through a blizzard

your feet take time to acclimatise.

You move slowly

and with each step you sink deeper.

You turn to check your progress

but you can’t quite be sure

which way to go,

which way you came.

For the moment it’s beautiful

but you know that underneath it all

the world is grey and very soon

the pain and numbness will hit.