Accepted - by Elizabeth Jennings
You are no longer young,
Nor are you very old.
There are homes where those belong.
You know you do not fit
When you observe the cold
Stares of those who sit
In bath-chairs or the park
(A stick, then, at their side)
Or find yourself in the dark
And see the lovers who,
In love and in their stride,
Don't even notice you.
This is a time to begin
Your life. It could be new.
The sheer not fitting in
With the old who envy you
And the young who want to win,
Not knowing false from true,
Means you have liberty
Denied to their extremes.
At last now you can be
What the old cannot recall
And the young long for in dreams,
Yet still include them all.
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Anger's Freeing Power - by Stevie Smith
I had a dream three walls stood up wherein a raven bird
Against the walls did beat himself and was this not absurd?
For sun and rain beat in that cell that had its fourth wall free
And daily blew the summer shower and the rain came presently
And the pretty summer time and all the winter too
That foolish bird did beat himself till he was black and blue.
Rouse up, rouse up, my raven bird, fly by the open wall
You make a prison of a place that is not one at all.
I took my raven by the hand, Oh come, I said, my Raven,
And I will take you by the hand and you shall fly to heaven.
But oh he sobbed and oh he sighed and in a fit he lay
Until two fellow ravens came and stood outside to say:
You wretched bird, conceited lump
You well deserve to pine and thump.
See, now a wonder, mark it well
My bird rears up in angry spell,
Oh do I then? he says and careless flies
O'er flattened wall at once to heaven’s skies,
And in my dream I watched him go
And I was glad, I loved him so,
Yet when I woke my eyes were wet
To think Love had not freed my pet,
Anger it was that won him hence
As only Anger taught him sense.
Often my tears fall in a shower
Because of Anger’s freeing power.
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