Tag Archives: poets
FMM 10 13 17 The Allure of Alliteration
“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”~ Edgar Allan Poe. As children we were taught the art of remembering by a number of tricks. Even without big theories of pedagogy, the old time teachers knew that if you presented information in rhyme or in song, it laid […]
FMM 10 6 17 Comfortably numb.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.” ~ John Donne. Some people are born story tellers. They may be telling you their shopping list but somehow they weave tension, drama and humor into the reciting of the mundane. There are those who you love to hear […]
FMM 5 19 17 Throwing Corn
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”~Ernest Hemingway. Reginald and Henrietta joined our family soon after we arrived in Jamaica. As city folk transplanted to rural Jamaica, we accepted the gifts as pets, not as the dinner (Reggie the rooster) and breakfast producer (Henrietta the Hen) they […]
FMM 11 4 16 Evoking our Better Angels
“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.”~Mikhail Gorbachev. One of the problems with growing up as a preacher’s child (parson pickney, in Jamaican terms) is the unrealistic expectation that somehow you will behave better than the average child. My mother discovered that I had ‘unfriended’ […]
FMM 10 16 15 Acceptance
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”~Aristotle. I moved from England to Jamaica as a child, at an age when I had no preconceived notions, no expectations. It did not occur to me that I was supposed to see differences; in skin color, in […]
FMM 5 30 14 Rise up This Morning
“But still like dust, I’ll rise” ~ Maya Angelou. What a legacy! What imagery; such vivid use of metaphor. Lines that sing, phrases that sway, Maya Angelou’s words have inspired countless women, girls, men, human beings all over the world for over fifty years. And they will continue to live on in books, on […]
FMM 5 31 13 Challenge your Assumptions
“…I am not what you supposed, but far different…” ~ Walt Whitman I was quite surprised when I learned that the poet Walt Whitman was a nurse. During the Civil War he bandaged the wounded and held the hands of the dying. It was a time when it was deemed to be inappropriate for women […]
Friday Morning Messages 