National Poetry Day

First Plug - Adisa
Second Plug - National Poetry Day
Third Plug - The Poetry Society

Right! Guess what day it is today. Got it yet? Very good.

I don't suppose I will have much luck trying to push NPD in this office. We no longer have any metal filing cabinets so the Magnetic poetry set is useless and as our fridge at home has a wooden door on it to hide it in the kitchen cupboards, the set is totally unusable. Maybe I could start a Sonnet tree like here. Sonnets need a lot of work but they are not as defined as you may imagine. I would think that the 14 line limit is the only one you should really stick to. The rhyming scheme can be anything as long as it has one. I am not fussy. I'd better not use the email for it as I suspect it might be against our corporate email policy - it would count as a chain letter. It will have to be done on paper.

Slushy 17th Century Poet of the Day And him a Clergyman.

I think I have at last exhausted the rubbish from my very early poetry notebook. There were plenty of great ideas but the execution was flawed. Any poems from now on should either be from the last notebook or new ones written on the fly - like Mushrooms. Maybe you will get one at lunchtime.

I have at last found the begging bowl Zen Koan which to my surprise is written by Arthur C Clark and is of course from the Fountains of Paradise

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - present) :(in a fictional undiscovered fragment of the Culavamsa in his novel The Fountains of Paradise)

Driven to despair by his fruitless attempts to understand the universe, the sage Devadasa finally announced in exasperation, "All statements that contain the word God are false."
Instantly, his least favorite disciple, Somasiri, replied, "The sentence I am now speaking contains the word God. I fail to see, oh Noble Master, how that simple statement can be false."
Devadasa considered the matter for several Poyas. Then he answered, this time with apparent satisfaction, "Only statements that do not contain the word God can be true."
After a pause barely sufficient for a starving mongoose to swallow a millet seed, Somasiri replied, "If this statement applies to itself, oh Venerable One, it cannot be true, because it contains the word God. But if it is not true - "
At this point, Devadasa broke his begging bowl upon Somasiri's head, and should therefore be honored as the true founder of Zen.

Not poetry I know. But it is poetic.