https://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?52311-Red-Headed The largest classic literature discussion forum on the Internet. Read Write Teach Share. en Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:09:10 GMT vBulletin 10 https://www.online-literature.com/forums/images/misc/rss.jpg https://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?52311-Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?12992-The-Myth-of-Margaret-Thatcher-(part-two) Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:48:56 GMT

One of the things that always interested me about Maggie Poppins is that she seemed to have no sense of humour & lacked empathy. She was a science graduate. She may have been able to collect & collate data intelligently, but she seemed unimaginative & didn't appear to understand that reality actually exists outside of a test tube or a petri dish. I think that this basic, almost autistic, inability to empathise or even sympathise with the majority of the people she harmed with her failed policies was a major part of her downfall. I also believe that her clinical & scientific approach to economic theory was a great factor in why she misinterpreted Frederich Hayek & Milton Friedman's theories so badly. Science, although ostensibly empirical, can also be paradigmatic. Scientists will postulate theories & tenaciously hold onto them even after their time has passed. Einstein, genius as he was, could not accept the Copenhagen Interpretation & quantum physics of Neils Bohr. Although no one can argue with most of the theory of relativity, concepts like Bell's theorem & quantum entanglement genuinely concerned Einstein. Even Stephen Hawking believes that the Grand Unified Theory will eventually be proved & gravity, electromagnetism & the weak & strong forces at a subatomic level will be all brought together in one nice neat equation. An equation as beautifully simple as E=MC2 perhaps. Einstein, however, failed *to achieve this in his lifetime. Bohr would have probably claimed that he was barking up the wrong tree.

There was an old joke about Thatcher that she lived 'just to the right of Barking'. Barking being a suburban area of London & 'barking mad' being an English expression for someone obviously insane. Thatcher's science background probably led to her interpreting the anarcho-capitalist & monetarist ideas propounded by Milton Friedman & Frederick Hayek as being genuine scientific treatises. In fact, economics is not really an empirical science or discipline as much as it is an art form. No one would be crazy enough to reintroduce classical 19th century economics based on laissez faire principles in late 20th century Britain surely? After all, they failed the first time round.

No one until Margaret Thatcher tried to implement them anyway. The result was a disaster for Britain & we are still having to live with her failed legacy. Even Hayek claimed she had misinterpreted what he wrote. She would often cite Adam Smith, yet seemed to just cherry pick anything from him that seemed to support her own tendentious but corrupted view of Friedman & monetarism. She seemed oblivious to Smith's own caveats against deregulation & many other warnings.

This dogmatic interpretation was her downfall eventually. I believe that the primary mistake she made was in interpreting theory & speculation as scientific fact. It takes an imagination to be able to separate the two. It takes an imagination to understand suffering. It was something she so desperately lacked. If she had had her 'wits about her' as the saying goes maybe she would have understood better. Even her paraphrasings from Shakespeare (undoubtedly written for her) were not particularly witty & her delivery of them seemed stilted & artificial. It takes imagination to be witty. It takes imagination to compromise. It takes imagination to value society rather than despise it. It takes imagination to exercise cognitive dissonance.

Failure was inevitable. Unfortunately, millions have to live with her unimaginative legacy.


"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
~ Margaret Thatcher

Rich coming from someone who squandered North Sea Oil revenue on tax concessions for the wealthy.

“Divisions of society are detrimental to all classes.”

“Civilisation is the humanisation of man in society.”

“Civil society rather than immature economics of laissez faire was necessary for progress in civilisation.”

~ Matthew Arnold

According to Maggie Poppins there really was no such thing as ‘society’. She divided British society more than at any time since WWII.

“Democracy is unstable as a political system & nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society & manner of life which is in harmony with that type.”

“Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows.”

“Capitalism encourages acquisitiveness & thereby corrupts everyone.”

~ R.H. Tawney (Economic Historian)

Thatcher promised less government interference & yet probably presided over the most over centralised government Britain has ever seen. She destroyed the unions so that there was no labour balance & deliberately instigated high unemployment as she knew that unemployment benefits are only a small percentage of the social security infrastructure funding. Pensions & child support being the majority. She knew high unemployment would keep inflation down & did not care about the millions of ‘moaning minnies’ whose lives she had destroyed. There is no empirical evidence that high inflation leads to low growth. Many Victorian & contemporary Pacific Rim economies have had high inflation & high growth rates. Wrong again Maggie. The acquisitiveness her policies subsequentally engendered have done nothing to create social cohesion in Britain & we now live in a more socially divided society since WWII.

“Utilitarianism claimed to be scientific & to have superseded moral casuistry; in fact it had only given a superficial cogency to a collection of moral sounding slogans”

~ J.S. Mill

The Benthamite laissez faire utilitarianism that Thatcher promoted was discredited over a hundred years ago. She didn’t actually do anything new. She claimed that social darwinism was scientific & therefore beyond any moral questioning. She didn’t care about the consequences of her actions to the majority who were destroyed by her policies. At the end of the day, her misunderstanding of monetarism & disregard for the warnings of Hayek & Adam Smith about total deregulation led to her often repeating the same old tired formulas. These so nauseated her own party eventually that they got rid of her.

"I'll pick you up in my car."
"Oh, you have a car?"
"No, I used to have a car & a chauffeur, but
I couldn't afford both, so I got rid of the car."
"What good is a chauffeur without a car?"
"I need him to drive me to work."
"How can he drive you to work without a car?"
"It's-a-okay. I don't have a job."

~ Chico & Groucho, Duck Soup

This from 'Duck Soup’ kind of says it all about Thatcherism.

I think that this Mary Poppins like analogy & perception of her descending magically out of nowhere on an umbrella to solve the economical problems of the world are a fiction invented by the right-wing in the United States. It seems that they desperately need to discredit many of Obama's policies & need something or someone to use as an example of a deus ex machina of some fashion. They seem to be fixated on Thatcher for this reason & by some desperate act of 'will to power' wish to make her mythology become an actual reality. It wasn't the fault of socialism that the Winter of Discontent happened, it was just a symptom of the economic downturn caused by the the 1973/4 oil crisis which started in the October of '73. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia) proclaimed an oil embargo. It was OAPEC's decision to 'punish' the US for its support of Israel that kick-started the economic decline among other factors. This inevitably had a knock-on effect on Europe. In the early 1970s there was even a possibility of petrol rationing & drivers were actually issued with ration books, although they were ultimately never used.

The fact is though that much of what is discussed about Thatcher really is egregious mythologising. Just as Chomsky believes that language & syntactic structures, including every sentence, can have a 'surface structure' & a 'deep structure' I believe that the same principle can be applied to mythology. Any sentence in the English language presupposes a familiarity with certain words or phrases & their cultural relativity. You only have to look at British & American idiomatic expressions & how they can be often misunderstood to see what I mean by this.

An American cyber-friend I was writing to, to my astonishment, had no idea of what the expression 'swings & roundabouts' meant to an English person. In other words, you need a cultural awareness to understand even basic concepts in language fully.

It appears that there is a certain amount of 'surface structure' mythology spoken about Thatcher in the US & this has been most probably appropriated & culturally reinterpreted by the right-wing. Thatcher has now become something in the right-wing American psyche that she actually never was in the first place. Her dogmatic single-mindedness & need to fight everyone who disagreed with her has been interpreted as a strength. When in fact her myopia & lack of empathy were weaknesses which eventually led to her downfall. A similar thing could be said about Hitler (or any other dictator like Thatcher's busom pal Pinochet) in that the dogmatism, bigotry & lack of empathy for human suffering were perceived as strengths rather than the weaknesses that they were.

Either way, the right-wing anti Obama-ites are going to have to fixate on a different mythological figure because it was game over for Maggie (Poppins) Thatcher & her failed policies in 1990.

She didn't even live happily ever after.


The writer Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) had a theory that many opinionated or dogmatic personalities get ‘fixed’ at a certain period in their lives & they find it difficult to accept new or different paradigms. He referred to it as ‘imprinting’ and believed that it normally happened when someone was relatively young and had their first peak experiences or a major life event in the manner described by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.

If Thatcher was born in 1925 it would mean that she would be about 21 when she graduated from Oxford in 1947. This was also around the time she would have started working for a living in her field of chemistry. Interestingly in 1948 she was turned down for a job at ICI for apparently being ‘headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated’. By this time she had also read Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’.

Before she even became an undergraduate British life and society was very different to what it was before the outbreak of war. The class system was much more divisive, there was no real social security infrastructure and people had to ‘know their place’ in life. Social divisions were rigid and inflexible. Life for most of the working classes was not easy and this was considered not only normal but almost divinely ordained. The social and economic divide was also maintained between the industrial north and the southern regions, the Capital and the Home Counties. This would all have seemed normal to Thatcher and she, according to Wilson, would have been 'imprinted' into this paradigmatic social order.

However, in 1947-48 things changed drastically. Clement Attlee's Labour government introduced the Transport Act and the railways were nationalised. The British House of Commons decided to nationalise mines and the Bank of England was nationalised. Attlee’s government also nationalised other transport systems including the canals, sea and shipping ports and the bus companies.

After the Second World War the idealistic Attlee government also decided to eradicate poverty and implement the ‘Welfare State’ a term coined by Archbishop Temple in 1941. It was an incredibly bold and ambitious plan and at the time had many detractors. William Beveridge proposed a system of national insurance which should be extended to all citizens “from the cradle to the grave”. This was eventually implemented by the Attlee ministries in 1948. It was the first in the world. It was dubbed ‘The New Jerusalem’ inspired by the famous line ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land’ in the introduction to Blake’s ‘From Milton’.

Thatcher would have witnessed all of this at a very important time in her life. Her way of life and the privileges that she and her middle class upbringing enjoyed would suddenly have seemed to be under threat. The parallels with what is happening in the United States with ‘Obama-care’ are too similar to be ignored.

Her subsequent need to reverse or destroy much of what Beveridge, Nye Bevan & the Attlee government achieved could be possibly explained in a need to return to a time when she originally had been ‘imprinted’, as Robert Wilson would have said, in a time before the NHS and other social improvement programs that had been instigated by the government of Clement Attlee.

She failed on so many levels that even her own party got rid of her.

She was ultimately reduced to sitting in the back of a limo crying her eyes out on national television after the Tories conspired to remove her permanently from office. The so called *'Iron Lady' crying like a big baby for the world to see. A fitting ignominious end if you ask me. ]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?12992-The-Myth-of-Margaret-Thatcher-(part-two) https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?12991-The-Myth-of-Margaret-Thatcher-(part-one) Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:46:11 GMT


When Thatcher came into power in 1979 one in seven children lived in poverty, only a year after she was in power it was one in three. I don't call that progress. She created strife where there was none before, accusing the miners of being the enemy within. Even police officers now admit they were ordered to start the violence against them. She destroyed them as revenge for the perception that they had brought down the Heath government. We import (virtually) all of our coal now. Britain, the country built on coal & the instigator of the Industrial Revolution that changed the world. Hitler united Britain against a common enemy & even after five years of carpet bombing Goering couldn't destroy British industry. Thatcher succeeded where Hitler & Goering failed, maybe she should have been awarded the Iron Cross.

Thatcher never actually delivered economic success after excessive government overspending, that is the myth. In 1945, the Labour government, even with heavy debts from WWII developed economic regeneration & created the NHS. It also eventually built hundreds of thousands of new houses. It was all very well for Thatcher to get people to buy their council houses, but now we have a social housing shortage & the 'Victorian' bedroom tax. The starship private enterprise yet again didn't magically intervene as Thatcher consistently claimed it would. Over thirty years before Thatcher was elected the economy grew by 150%, since Thatcher it has only grown by around only 100%. She squandered the 16% North Sea Oil revenue by giving it away as tax cuts to the wealthy instead of reinvesting it Keynesian style.

Thatcher reduced taxation for the middle classes & the wealthy whilst simultaneously increasing it in stealth taxation *believing that it would stimulate growth & produce a trickle down effect. It didn't. Thatcher didn't encourage any retraining or investment in any infrastructure expecting private enterprise to solve the problem. It didn't. The water companies are still losing 50% water in leakages & have never tried to improve after privatisation. They just made people redundant & now the shareholders are making a profit from what were once industries owned by the taxpayer.

Thatcher's ultimate con-trick was to sell off public utilities to foreign shareholders that had been paid for & owned by the British taxpayer. The railways went the same way. Thatcher asset stripped the country & effectively sold the crown jewels to give tax concessions to the already wealthy expecting them to boost the economy & reinvest in infrastructure.

She also introduced hundreds of stealth taxes, such as taxing take out food like fish & chips. Our economy slowing was a direct result of the oil crisis of the early 1970s which itself was a product of the conflict in the Middle East. OPEC then had the Western world over a barrel (literally millions of barrels). The Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia) proclaimed an oil embargo. It was OAPEC's decision to 'punish' the US for its support of Israel & this had a 'knock-on’ effect on all Western economies. Also there was manufacturing gravitating towards Asia even then. Thatcher stopped all state support to industry expecting ‘market forces’ to magically restore everything. It didn’t. Even Friedrich Hayek claimed that Thatcher misunderstood his theories. She was quick to wave a copy of 'The Road to Serfdom' at the opposition but it is debatable on whether she actually read any of his works. He certainly didn't recommend complete deregulation. It is this deregulation, predominantly of international banking, that has caused the crisis we are now in. Well done Maggie!

The worst of the Thatcher deregulations were almost certainly the railway networks. The railways never really made much of a profit even when they were first built. It was only because of the fact that Britain had an empire & channelled wealth from its exploitation that kept the railway network running. State ownership was inevitable. Now the British railway network is owned predominantly by German & French state-supported railways. Their railways are much cheaper to travel on & better maintained. When British railway companies lose money, the British taxpayer bails them out. When they make a profit it goes to the foreign owned & subsidised companies.

Thatcher promised less government interference & yet probably presided over the most over centralised government Britain has ever seen. She destroyed the unions so that there was no labour balance & deliberately instigated high unemployment as she knew that unemployment benefits are only a small percentage of the social security infrastructure funding. Pensions & child support being the majority. She knew high unemployment would keep inflation down & did not care about the millions of ‘moaning minnies’ whose lives she had destroyed. There is no empirical evidence that high inflation leads to low growth. Many Victorian & contemporary Pacific Rim economies have had high inflation & high growth rates. Wrong again Maggie. The acquisitiveness her policies subsequentally engendered have done nothing to create social cohesion in Britain & we now live in a more socially divided society since WWII.

I doubt Thatcher would have been elected in a second time if it wasn’t for the patriotism & outrage generated by the Falklands conflict. A conflict she could have easily prevented before it happened but chose to ignore the warning signs. Even though the MOD had warned her at regular intervals. We have three main political parties. Progressively less people voted for the Tories, the majority of the vote was split between the Labour & Liberal Democrat parties. In the UK you don't vote directly for the Prime Minister but for local representative political candidates selected from three (or more) parties. Thatcher repeatedly got in on a tiny minority vote in a non-proportional system. Technically she was statistically the most unpopular Prime Minister of all time.

Speaking of the Falklands War, there was a victory parade held on the 12th of October 1982 starting at Armoury Place & ending at Guildhall.

Thatcher gave her speech at the Guildhall after the parade at the ‘Salute to the Task Force’ luncheon including the lines:

“We, the British people, are proud of what has been done, proud of these heroic pages in our island story, proud to be here today to salute the task force. Proud to be British.”

All very well & good to be proud Margaret. But how many people have forgotten about how you didn’t want the maimed, disfigured & injured troops to attend the parade?

Soldiers who had the ultimate right to be there. What was she so scared (or ashamed) of? *

Shame on you Maggie, if you ask me.

General Leopoldo Galtieri who led the military junta at the time had a variety of domestic problems and certainly made it known how the junta felt about the Falklands. This was almost certainly sabre rattling and many doubted that an invasion was really on the cards.

Notwithstanding that Thatcher was allegedly making plans for legislation to change the national status of the Falkland Islanders themselves. Plans which oddly never came to fruition, especially after the conflict itself.

Eventually Galtieri seemed to have painted himself into a corner and couldn’t back out without losing face.


The MOD had their suspicions but Thatcher wouldn’t listen to any advice on the possibility of an invasion and seemed to not act on any of it.

Timeline: *

March 28:
Argentine fleet sets sail under the guise of naval manoeuvres.

March 29:
Submarines sent to Falklands. Fort Austin sails from Gibraltar to replenish HMS Endurance.

March 31:
British decoders intercept radio message to the Argentinian submarine Sante Fe, which orders her to examine the beaches around Stanley for possible landing sites.

April 1
British nuclear submarines, HMS Spartan and HMS Splendid sail from Faslane bound for the Falklands.

April 2:
Argentine forces mounted amphibious landings of the Falkland Islands, following the civilian occupation of South Georgia on 19 March, before the Falklands War began. The invasion met a nominal defence organised by the Falkland Islands' Governor Sir Rex Hunt, giving command to Major Mike Norman of the Royal Marines. Events included the landing of Lieutenant Commander Guillermo Sanchez-Sabarots' Amphibious Commandos Group, the attack on Moody Brook barracks, the engagement between the troops of Hugo Santillan and Bill Trollope at Stanley, and the final engagement and surrender at Government House.

~ (Information on April 2nd by courtesy of Wikipedia)

Every previous British government has heeded the warning signs and taken action beforehand to prevent Argentine aggression. *

Some people have conjectured on whether she deliberately allowed the conflict to escalate for the advancement of her own career.

What went wrong for Thatcher? Was she just too myopic to see the danger or did she just not care?

I have a free health service in my country. Millions of Americans have no health care. Thatcher wanted to destroy our National Health Service. She failed in that as well. Our NHS was envied & imitated by the Western world. I have the freedom to universal health care. That's real freedom. Thatcher was quick to talk about social parasites & the enemy within. The real parasites are those British residents who have 23 trillion pounds in offshore accounts to avoid paying any tax in the UK. I'll give you a hint, these aren't poor people. If they paid their taxes we would be financially fine. Who are the real parasites? Thatcher squandered billions of pounds of oil revenue to give tax concessions to the rich. Why didn't she invest in infrastructure? Oh yes, I forgot, she totally disregarded Keynesian economics. Which is odd because her own party had to resort back to some of it. Maggie Poppins & her distorted tendentious monetarism never worked even once.

Eventually she was an embarrassment to her own party & was finally even thrown out of it. Maggie Poppins didn't get anything right it seems. Especially with the EU. The Poll Tax didn't get it right either for Maggie. She once claimed that she had never been wrong about anything or ever made a mistake in her entire life. The hubris of that statement is particularly telling. Perhaps she should have studied the history of the last time a poll tax was introduced into England in 1381.

The Benthamite laissez faire utilitarianism that Thatcher promoted was discredited over a hundred years ago (predominantly by J.S. Mill in his essay ‘On Utilitarianism’). She didn’t actually do anything new. She claimed that social darwinism was scientific & therefore beyond any moral questioning. She didn’t care about the consequences of her actions to the majority who were destroyed by her policies. At the end of the day, her misunderstanding of monetarism & disregard for the warnings of Hayek & Adam Smith about total deregulation led to her often repeating the same old tired formulas. These so nauseated her own party eventually that they got rid of her.

At the end, even wielding her magic handbag didn't help. There never was any magic. It was all make believe. She did nothing for my country. A spoon full of monetarism didn't help anything go down. It doesn't matter how much you click your heels together on the yellow brick road, say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or pray for Maggie Poppins to drop down out of the sky on her monetarist brolly. She didn't get anything right.

Not even in fairy tales ... ]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?12991-The-Myth-of-Margaret-Thatcher-(part-one) https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11837-Toadstools Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:59:24 GMT * A summer downpour flowering umbrellas - glistening toadstools. *

A summer downpour
flowering umbrellas -
glistening toadstools.


]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11837-Toadstools https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11835-The-Jesus-amp-Mary-Chain-Drift-(reprise) Wed, 27 Jul 2011 22:22:20 GMT It takes about forty-five minutes on the train
That's three quarters of an hour more or less,
And as the countryside vistas flow past
I can listen to The Jesus And Mary Chain.

Of course I could listen to anything I desired,
An act of Puccini, maybe all of Tabarro.
All just as long as it allows me the drift
Drowsily merging the rhythm required

To make my commuting seem so surreal
And take me away from the urban mundane.
The drift sets me up & tempers my mood
Which prepares me well for how I will feel.

By Never Understand I know I'm half way
The first real glimpses of entering the city
and, as Larkin observed, just not at its best.
Aesthetically, to me though, just another workday.

Life is a journey as platforms fly by us
And we all have to find our own ways to drift
While the vistas go by to recede in the distance
We'll have to believe that all isn't hopeless.

The ear buds come out as I step from the carriage
The weather's picked up and I'm enjoying the silence.
So maybe tomorrow I'll listen to some Wagner
But noise pop & train rides appeal as a marriage.

]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11835-The-Jesus-amp-Mary-Chain-Drift-(reprise) https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11832-Sunsets Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:16:40 GMT Red ripe apples hang and sometimes fall from my tree - grubs have taken theirs, wind blows, leaves tumble the heat of summer fading - my...


Red ripe apples hang
and sometimes fall from my tree -
grubs have taken theirs,

wind blows, leaves tumble
the heat of summer fading -
my joints feeling stiff,

bright July sunset
swirling white, crimson & blue -
raspberry ripple.


]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11832-Sunsets https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11829-Carrion Wed, 27 Jul 2011 06:21:10 GMT

I wake early these days
And often miss the ends of dreams.

It's not going to bother me much though
As I am doomed to tune-in to the repeats.

Breathless, bathed in a sweaty melancholy,
The rancid wings of the giant carrion birds

Envelope me, smother me, enervate me, and enfold me
As they wait for my inevitable demise.

I'm lucky to have survived this long,
From the ceaseless pecking of their hated beaks.

Free me from this flesh, pick me to the bone!
Waste me, eat me, drink me, kill me.

You despicable shadowless souls of darkness,
You hunched and hideous fiends from hell.

]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11829-Carrion https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11828-Wisdom-amp-Time-(haiku-chain) Wed, 27 Jul 2011 05:18:56 GMT * Warm, long, bright evenings seem so timeless in our youth - but summer will end. Time passes for us, hopefully we get wiser - well before...

Warm, long, bright evenings
seem so timeless in our youth -
but summer will end.

Time passes for us,
hopefully we get wiser -
well before winter.

And if we learn well
perhaps next year's nascent spring -
will bring a rebirth.


]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?11828-Wisdom-amp-Time-(haiku-chain) https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9507-Moon-Willow Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:17:09 GMT Misty moon willow through weeping lonely branches why are you so sad?

Misty moon willow
through weeping lonely branches
why are you so sad?



]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9507-Moon-Willow https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9505-Weeping-Willow Sat, 12 Dec 2009 02:20:59 GMT

Weeping willow leans
& cries into the river
streaming tearful leaves.




]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9505-Weeping-Willow https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9429-Firmament Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:49:56 GMT Legs planted astride I gaze up at the night sky Upon high Orion appears to stare back at me. Mirroring each other cosmically in time The...

Legs planted astride I gaze up at the night sky
Upon high Orion appears to stare back at me.

Mirroring each other cosmically in time
The macrocosm reflects the microcosm.

We view each other pensively in the still air,
The 'Hunter' & the hunted maybe, maybe not.

I, a sentient, thinking, feeling human being,
He, a random chance of interstellar parallax.

The firmament blazes, Milky Way meanders
& Sirius sparkles like a jewel in a crown.

A shooting star wish crosses the sky then fades out
Like some cosmic firework display just for me.

Just a speck of dust entering the atmosphere
Joining all of the other specks, including us.



]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9429-Firmament https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9379-Swifts Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:15:04 GMT


Synchronisation -
trying to outrun the wind
swifts turning quickly

follow the leader
fleeting moments of flocking
ducking & diving

three dozen arced wings
all acting with sentience -
collectively dart.


]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9379-Swifts https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9322-Midnight-Fox Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:25:50 GMT * Midnight fox looks back with vulpine furtivity - so surreptitious.



Midnight fox looks back
with vulpine furtivity -
so surreptitious.



]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9322-Midnight-Fox https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9315-Window-Cleaners Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:11:22 GMT Perspicacity - The windows of perception often need cleaning.


Perspicacity -
The windows of perception
often need cleaning.



]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9315-Window-Cleaners https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9277-Day-s-Eye Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:40:15 GMT

Sun rising today
bright yellow shiny button -
the day's eye of hope.

]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9277-Day-s-Eye https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9255-Bluebell-Wood Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:10:11 GMT Bluebell Wood was always heaven And I would spend so much time there Even being only seven We knew a paradise so fair, Times of innocently...
Bluebell Wood was always heaven
And I would spend so much time there
Even being only seven
We knew a paradise so fair,
Times of innocently playing
Often when it was not raining,
Those bluebells grew in clumps so small
A wonder they were seen at all.
Then one day with playful banter
Each from his village neighbourhood
As we approached our verdant wood
A sign proclaimed: ‘Do Not Enter!’
Stopping suddenly in our tracks
We lachrymosely turned our backs.



A Pushkinian Sonnet: Lines 1,3,5,6,9 & 12 have a feminine rhyme, the others being masculine & an ABABCCDDEFFEGG rhyme scheme. Traditionally it has an eight syllable count (four Iambic feet) per line. I am not so sure the form translates well to a Germanic language like English.
]]> Red-Headed https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?9255-Bluebell-Wood