A bumpy track led to the old cottage. The place hadn't been lived in for quite a while but was intact, a perfect timber-framed Tudor cottage. Even the old thatch didn't leak. Just two rooms downstairs with a small lean-to on the back, the kitchen still had a Dutch oven and an old copper for hot water. A kite-winder staircase followed the central chimney up to two bedrooms.

The place was coming up for auction. Desperately I wanted it. At the auction it made four times what I could afford. The buyer did not move in however. There was a story about him being in prison. At this time the farmers used to dispose of waste straw after combining by burning it in the fields, a practice now banned. That's how the thatch caught alight. There was no attempt to fight the fire because no-one even noticed it. Gales later blew in the gable ends, then the chimney crumbled, brambles grew over it until there was hardly a visible trace of the place left.

I wish I could have saved it. It would have been beautiful. Instead I bought a little terrace, then a detached needing renovation, then the one we have today. I got what I wanted eventually, but I still think about that old place sometimes, and how I wanted it.

How many time have my black brothers and
Sisters divided theirs tears Into Sections
With each drop, with each snuffle
With each tissue:  we thread:  as we bled to death

The chanting will echoed, the violent will rise
the barricade will  followed: then someone will die.
Black Lives Matters: Black lives matters
Are we really free?  
Are we still running from the police?

They is no such thing as equal rights
Those are upright and downright lies:
No justice no peace:  said you mama,
So heartless said your sister,
I will killed them said my brothers

As I compose this piece, racism is another kind
Of deadly disease: without a lease, without a cure:
As I stay here and listen to
the helicopter circling the neighborhood
All I can think of is bad actions, deadly reactions

Everybody stay calm, everybody stay down
Life isn’t fair,
chanted the big crowd  in Trafalgar Square:

1 Corinthians 15:54, 55:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
Death only uses violence:

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

In the beginning
There were Adam and Eve
There was kindness,
and there was peace:

Everyone smiles in the same language
Not everyone hurts the same way:
Goodbye my brother .R.I.P

A time for demonstrating, a time to showed leadership
a time to be happy, a time to be sad,
A time to pull the trigger, a time to seize fire
A time for karma, a time for relaxing while the night calms

Rest in Peace my brother: George Floyd

Fading
Like a beauty queen
Grown old,
Sunrise is too quckly over.
ljm

I try to see the beauty in a rose
But it smells just like a **** to me.

My pen is filled with lovely words
That I can’t put on paper.

My heart’s aware that it’s been robbed
Of everything that’s velvet

But it beats on in vain attempt
To recognize a bluebird.
ljm

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems