Rainer Maria Rilke

Two poems in blue...

Halfway Between Sadness and Distress & Iglu

Zoe Murdoch Dead Magpie Blues, 2013

From Abridged Online 'This issue encourages the consideration of the vital connotations of the concept of ‘blue’ to the human condition and the individual’s contemplation of place, purpose, self and essence. The strong association of the colour blue with the natural (the sea and sky), the broken (melancholy) and the forbidden (pornography) have led to said colour concurrently evoking ideas of apparent wholesomeness, failure and seedy delinquency. Blue runs underneath us and domes above us; it is what bore us and what we aspire through imagination to return to: another dimension, another means of perceiving, breathing, moving, experiencing… It is the colour of the most subtle moods of pain, not burning with the disarming immediacy of horror or despair but throbbing in mellow multiplicity and tonal diversity, slowly moving through the depths of reflection. Blue dances with dappled light, altering perception and renewing reflection. In creative discourses we take it from outside us and hold it as our own, making our subtle moods of humanity material by weaving them through its soft, swelling diversity. Blue was our home, to blue we long to return. We wish to wallow in its mellow discontent hoping for a return to the good old days. Days that never did or could have existed: days that define us.'

Peace between all nations...

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen


What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
      Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

George Stinney Jr

He was too small to lift the murder weapon.

Josh Aiken performs George Stinney in Edison Theatre in Washington University in St. Louis at the 2012 Poetry Grand Slam.










Lawyers seek new trial for 14-year-old South Carolina boy executed in 1944.



'The request for a new trial points out that at 95 pounds, Stinney likely couldn't have killed the girls and dragged them to the ditch.

The motion also hints at community rumors of a deathbed confession from a white man several years ago and the possibility Stinney either confessed because his family was threatened or he was given ice cream. But the court papers provide little information and the lawyers also wouldn't elaborate.

At 14, Stinney was the youngest person executed in this country in the past 100 years, according to statistics gathered by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Newspaper stories from his execution had witnesses saying the straps to keep him in the electric chair didn't fit around his small frame and an electrode was too big for his leg.''

(Wikipedia)  George Junius Stinney, Jr., (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944) was, at age 14, the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century.

Stinney was convicted of murdering two pre-teen girls after police said he confessed to the murders. But the question of Stinney's guilt, the validity of his alleged confession, and the judicial process leading to his execution have been criticized as "suspicious at best and a miscarriage of justice at worst" and as an example of the many injustices African-Americans suffered in courtrooms in the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

One Love, One Heart

Let's get together and feel all right...

Poets reading their poems...

The Forward prize tried to add glamour or celebrity by bringing in actors to read the poems. As if the poets, lacking in a Rada training course, could not inject the right meaning or excitement to their own words. Don't get me wrong, I love listening to actors read, or rather act, out lines that other people have written.

But there is something very interesting and intimate hearing the inflection the poet chooses to put into their own words, the pauses, the emphasis on certain words I might have skimmed when reading it on a page. Plus, the pleasure of their personal accent, tone, personality that then becomes attached to the poem when I read it in the future and still hear the poet's voice in my head.