He banned no creed and he barred no class,

And he called to his friends by name;

But the worst would shake his head and pass

And none would drink from the bloodstained glass

And the goblet red with shame.



And I know when I hear the last grim call

And my mortal hour is spent,

When the light is hid and the curtains fall

I would rather sleep with the dead Ben Hall

Than go where that traitor went.

It can be read in full here:
http://dreamsis29.tripod.com/DeathBenHall.htm

(Love that ending).

CS thanks for the story link. It was beaut.

Oh and Foxy I agree with what you said earlier. For me it's just a matter of not wasting more time and energy grappling with the determinedly antagonistic. Just too predictable. Too tedious.

Squeers: Glad that you got a kick out of Eddie Izzard. Watching him on Utube is one of my favourite forms of procrastination!

pynch

Dear csteele,

Thank You for the Emile Zola story.
It resonates with me as well.

I remember as a teenager having the
longest plaits, my hair was way past my
waist and very thick. I stood out from
the other girls at school. I kept asking
my mother to have a modern trendy short cut.
Mum said no. So one day I snipped off one
of the plaits, and that was that! I ended
up getting my short cut.

Today, my long mane is back - (my husband
loves long hair), and I wouldn't change
it for a short cut for quids. So there
you are. Peer pressure when you're young
has a great influence.

Dear Pynch, Thanks for all your choices in poetry.
I enjoy them very much. People's choices bring
back so many memories of things learned in the
past and stored in our memories.

Dear Squeers, Don't forget to share some of your
poetry readings with the rest of us.

Dear Csteel and all,
Tried to post this last night but computer issues.
I’m still growing into my gentility on OLO, but not sure whether to accept this encroaching persona gratia or reject him; as he becomes more urbane, does he not lose his critical edge, sacrificing politics for diplomacy? “Diplomacy is thinking twice before saying nothing”, someone once said.
No, Squeers is not ready for the smoking jacket just yet. Complacency is an unfounded luxury; there’s work to be done and thoughts to be thunk. The world is a mess and we have an obligation to our children to act, or at least foment. Thus your Lawson quote is precisely the kind of fatalism I rebel against. For too long the human race has rationalised away its evil deeds via religion or philosophy. Religion is the refuge of the sophist and the defeated. Herein I differ with Keats, who’s philosophy surely we can only embrace in a climate of idealism, when all that’s solid melts into air. For me, we can only be complacent, or romantic, when the ‘suffering’ in the world is reducible to philosophy. Ultimately, life ‘is’ reducible to philosophy, the absurd, but we’re not there yet, and nature and natural being is still rather neat and we shouldn’t despise it. Did we despise it when we were young and vigorous? No, it’s only when we’re old and infirm, with nothing to gain and nothing to lose, that we learn such affectation and abandon the world.
Not very inspiring, I know, but it’s been a long day. A poem to follow.

Continued.

“A Shattered Illusion”

On everything poetic
Your moderns look askance:
And daily Prose deals frequent blows
Destructive to Romance.

But though Romance is dying,
Like everything that's nice,
Since I was young I've thought it hung
Around the Edelweiss.

'Twas plucked, I deemed, by lovers,
Who braved the Alpine snows,
And hung for weeks from icy peaks,
Suspended by their toes:

They cared not though beneath them
There yawned a drop of miles,
But with a grin they roped it in,
And won their lady's smiles.

But now it seems that perils
Need not be faced at all:
You only need to buy the seed,
The price of which is small;

And in the heart of London,
A mile from Temple Bar,
You plant in earth your pennyworth,
And then - well, there you are!

Oh, Times's correspondent,
You might have spared us this!
We did not know that this was so,
And ignorance was bliss.

If further revelations
You chance to have in store,
Be generous, please, and spare us these,
I hear they don't want more. PG Wodehouse

In the same vein, Squeers, there's this:

They flutter behind us
Our possible pasts
Some wild-eyed and crazy
Some frightened and masked

A warning to anyone
Still in command
Of our possible futures
To take care

Roger Waters

Sry, should be "your" possible pasts and "their" possible futures.