FEAST OR FAMINE

  The Year  by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1910)    What can be said in New Year rhymes, That’s not been said a thousand times? The new year comes, the old year goes, We know we dream, we dream we know We rise up laughing with the light, We lie down weeping with the night. We hug the world until it stings, We curse it then and sigh for wings. We live, we love, we woo, we wed, We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead. We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear, And that’s the burden of the year.   Poem for a New Year  by Matt Goodfellow   Something’s moving in, I hear the weather in the wind, sense the tension of a sheep-field and the pilgrimage of fins.   Something’s not the same, I taste the sap and feel the grain, hear the rolling of the rowan ringing, singing in a change.   Something’s set to start, there’s meadow-music in the dark and the clouds that shroud the mountain Slowly, softly start to part. MARTINA NICOLLS MartinaNicollsWebsite Rainy Day Heali...

  Poems for Happiness  (2019) is a collection of about 100 poems, all exploring the art of happiness.   It is divided into 7 sections: Happy Thought; Glory be to God for Dappled Things; I Sing of Brooks, of Blossoms, Birds and Bowers; Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth; Friendship is Love Without his Wings; He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven; and The Shape of a Good Greyhound.    The collection includes various artists from the known – such as Rudyard Kipling and William Wordsworth – to the unknown, such as Anon!   The ‘human experience of happiness’ can be short or long, incidental or purposefully sought, based on luck or good choices, or the result of love, freedom, food, work, leisure, religion, beauty, shining things, nature, friendships, and everything in between.    Classic poem titles include:  ‘May the Road Rise Up to Meet You’ - Anon ‘Shut Not Your Doors to Me, Proud Libraries’ – Walt Whitman ‘I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose’ – Emil...

   

  In Australia, people may have forgotten the man called Christmas. One of Australia’s 31 Prime Ministers from 1901 to the present day was called Christmas. The 27 th  Prime Minister was a woman but Julia Gillard was not called Christmas. Earle Christmas Grafton Page became Australia’s 11 th  Prime Minister in 1939. He was PM for a brief 19 days. That’s not the shortest premiership in Australian political history – that honour goes to Francis Michael Forde, who served for 8 days from 6-13 July 1945 after the death of John Curtin in office. Earle Christmas Grafton Page (1880-1961) was from the Country Party and served from 7-26 April 1939, the second shortest premiership. When PM Joseph Lyons died suddenly in 1939, Governor-General Lord Gowrie (Queen Elizabeth’s representative in Australia) appointed Page as the caretaker Prime Minister while the government, the United Australia Party (UAP), chose a new leader – the former deputy leader Robert Menzies.  Page refused t...

 

  It began with a discussion between old friends before one of them, unknown to me, sent me an email.     Eighty-five-year-old Rex, a retired English headmaster since 1992, living half time in the south of France from 1988-2017, was chatting to his friend about Crab Spiders.    His friend had photographed one, highly camouflaged, and ready to pounce on a butterfly. The friends talked about the multitude of dangers that butterflies face in the world as they grow from eggs to larvae to pupae and emerge as beautiful flying insects.    One of the dangers is being eaten by Crab Spiders. Rex recalled that he had photographs of butterflies being eaten by Crab Spiders. Specifically, a  Spanish Gatekeeper butterfly   ( Pyronia bathseba ) in the Nymphalidae family of brush-footed butterflies. It is native to the Iberian Peninsula, France, Morocco, and Algeria, and seen from May to July. It’s life is short – only 2-5 weeks.   And Rex did some ...