My hair is barely wet 

At all 

And yet 

The rain did fall 

As I stood 

In yonder wood. 

The yammer 

Of a hammer 

Reached my ear, 

While the birds free 

Sang to me 

As I touched the flowers 

That know not hours. 

Curse the coffee cups and spoons
The yellow fog, the window panes
Curse the dying of the light
Curse the rage against the night.

Curse daffodils, satanic mills
Pleasure domes, the albatross,
Comparisons to summer day
The last man in, an hour to play.

Curse roads divergent in a wood,
The knock upon a moonlit door
The airman’s helmet and the hawk
Painted women and their talk.

Curse Gunga Din, curse Kubla Khan,
Curse the Tiger burning bright.
Curse Dulce Et Decorum Est
Let Drummer Hodge not find his rest.

Unstop the clocks, unmuffle drums
Forget the honey with your tea.
Forget the grin of bitterness,
The look of rooms returning thence.

Forget the friendly bombs on Slough
And men in brightly lit canteens.
Curse the damns of your content
The crumpling floods that force a vent.

Zero hour will never come,
We won’t ride a merry go round
Or…

WITHOUT spending any money!

I know, I know … finding the money to support authors by buying their books is not always easy. I have a hard time in that department myself.

However, there are many ways that Readers can help Authors of books they’ve already read and enjoyed. These ideas are every bit as valuable to Authors as actual sales can be – and they will cost you absolutely nothing to do. They just require an investment of your TIME, and your ENTHUSIASM to make things happen. Never underestimate what a READER of books can accomplish when they choose to champion a particular book or an Author.

So, here you go! 10 ways you can invest in Authors and Books without spending any money …

1. Borrow and read books from the library. Rate those books on the library’s system. Request that the library purchase other books by…

The snowflakes fall,

And she steps between them,

Finding galaxies in gaps,

Hoping for the magic to touch her.

Because what’s the point,

Of finding the words,

If life doesn’t, hasn’t touched you?

I first came across Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden” while listening to BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please! It is one of those poems to which I return frequently and lines from which pop unbidden into my head

—

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,

To the low last edge of the long lone land.

If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand ?

So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,

Through branches…

I have always been here, among the lonely people. Despite having people around me, my battles exist within my head and body. To you, I may look normal, but on the inside is a scene entirely different. My constant companions are sadness, frustration, exhaustion — even a fortified fortress to shield me from what the world has and could continue to do to me. Those walls isolate me from my family. The shadows are filled with creatures that know how to hurt me if I move too close. So, you see, I am one of the lonely people. But I am not alone.
Sarah Doughty)

All the Lonely People—

they converge,

invisible at intersections

of Life and Death,

strangely untouched by hands of those

simpatico.

How can it be that so many similar

do exist while lost

to one another?

All the Lonely People—

they are unalone, and yet

Its so strange to think
That you’re not there
In that little house on Salem Avenue
Sitting on the couch
Quietly reading fantasy novels on your Kindle
While Dad watches NCIS,
As if you’d always been there
And always would,
While I sit here across the mountains
Hunched over a notebook
Writing til my hand cramps
Trying to make sense of it all.