Happy Birthday Smiley

Dear Keith: We hope you have the happiest of birthdays. Love and Hugs, Janistan

Click here for your extra-special birthday greeting: The Monkey Birthday - YouTube

A Birthday Poem
Birthdays come and go each year,
Today is yours, so don’t you fear.
Conversations fill the air,
We have joined you since we care.

Funny jokes and laughs out loud,
We will always be your crowd.
Even though we're miles away
A birthday wish is sent your way.

With you we'll dance all through the night,
Until our spirits are truly light.
To celebrate our dearest friend,
A birthday poem, we wish to send.

Kindness by

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

By 

Naomi Shihab Nye

In Tribute to Janistan River Adventure

Just to lighten up things a bit, here is a tribute to our upcoming adventure! Hope you enjoy and we will see you in a couple of weeks. We will be looking forward to your analyses Silverhoody and Smiley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKWHB6v-PRI&feature=fvwp&NR=1

WH,Auden Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

The Human Abstract by William Blake

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.

And mutual fear brings Peace,
Till the selfish loves increase:
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the grounds with tears;
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The gods of the earth and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human Brain.

WHY?

Cause and effect

RIC Z. BASTASA

Some are not really causes
But just symptoms
And we misdiagnose
A sickness
For a symptom
Of the real sickness

The cause
And the effect
Are often interchanged

For instance
Is poverty the cause
Of crime
Or is poverty
Only the symptom
Of it?

For instance
Is ignorance
The cause of poverty
Or is it simply
An effect of poverty?

Or is poverty
Nothing but an effect
Of ignorance?

Or is poverty
Just an effect
Of an oppression
Of the rich
Taking much
From the poor
Who gets poorer
Everyday
Because there
Are no reforms
Coming
To solve
His poverty
His ignorance
His having to commit a crime
To survive
His poverty
His ignorance
His being a crime
Of
Society itself
who never cared
And wanted him
Who never
Instituted the much
Promised reforms?

And so you doubt
The cause and effect
The effect from cause
And if you did not mind so
Well
They may always be
Interchanged
And mistaken
For the symptoms
The conditions
That always
Are
there deceiving.

Anthology Discovery

Have discovered 2 anthologies
Immortal Poets and the Seashell Anthology  both edited by Christopher Burns on Kindle.

Also expecting delivery of the Riot of Reading book set in Turkey

Sophie's choice !

As she was playing in the paddling pool in the garden yesterday I asked Sophie what her favourite poem was . As she tested her newly created waterslide she recited this poem happlily "

When a tooth falls out ,

my mouth feels gappy

But it only shows up

If I get too happy

;-)