Touchdown at the Newest Bluestocking Inn. Pudding, cups of tea, the vegetable garden coming into its own, and gerbils beautiful gerbils all furry.

[DeanElderberry]

All females welcome for intelligent discourse and non-harmful comestibles.

A different take:
Losses
Randall Harrell
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, ‘Our casualties were low.’

And another, by the wonderfully-named

Leading Aircraftwoman Suzy Fletcher

PILOT
by Leading Aircraftwoman Suzy Fletcher

Have no fear for me when I fly by night
For I may wander freely with the stars
And taste of the wild intoxication of heaven.
Have no fear for me in the wind and the rain
For I am one with the sky and the racing clouds for ever.

I know that in an hour begrudged of time
My spirit, whirling through the skies,
May come to rest upon the edge of darkness;
But have no fear for me, for waking
I shall discover the brightness of eternity.

So in the beauty of the universe
Shall I take delight,
And in destruction and death and sorrow
Shall I find my freedom.

Sitting at the bar contemplating life, is it poets night?

Lovely

Reminded me of this

Thoughts in 1932
by Siegfried Sassoon
Alive — and forty-five — I jogged my way
Across a dull green day,
Listening to larks and plovers, well content
With the pre-Roman pack-road where I went.

Pastoral and pleasant was the end of May.
But readers of the times had cause to say
That skies were brighter for the late Victorians;
And " The Black Thirties" seemed a sobriquet
Likely to head the chapters of historians.

Above Stonehenge a drone of engines drew
My gaze; there seven and twenty war-planes flew
Manoeuvring in formation; and the drone
Of that neat-patterned hornet-gang was thrown
Across the golden downland like a blight.

Cities, I thought, will wait them in the night
When airmen, with high-minded motives, fight
To save Futurity. In years to come
Poor panic-stricken hordes will hear that hum,
And Fear will be synonymous with Flight.

I had to Google it. I remembered the poet and the last line has always stuck with me. The Vulcan bomber didn't hum. It howled. My sprogs called it the scaryplane.

I remember watching a Vulcan displaying at Manston in the late 80s or possibly early 90s. Full reheat, low level pass. Couldn't hear yourself think and it set off all the car alarms in the car park. Glorious plane.

Sasoon made me think of Wilfred Owen, whom i studied. Dulce et decorum est

Knock at the front door this afternoon opened it to two blokes clutching tool boxes and a pink bit of paper.

The older man said “carpet” nothing else. So i said have never been so insulted in my life.

younger bloke looks in confusion at older bloke who looked at his pink piece of paper and said have we the wrong address, its the opposite house, and went on their way.

Iirc Wilfred Owen was killed just a few days before the war ended. I don't know why that should seem any more tragic and wasteful than any of the other deaths but it does.

Inspired by the lovely poems yesterday evening, this one is dedicated to our own Bluestocking pilot, Gemini.

Tiny paws on the throttle, a twitch of her nose,
In a custom-built cockpit, the aviator goes.
With a flick of her whiskers and goggles pulled tight,
The gerbil takes off in the dead of the night.

She loops past the steeple and dives through the fog,
Far braver than any old tomcat or dog.
Above the brick chimneys, she banks with a flair,
The mistress of currents, a queen of the air.

Below sits The Bluestocking, cozy and bright,
Where scholars and poets discuss through the night.
They toast to her engine—that rhythmic, soft hum—
And wait for the pilot to finally come.

She touches down softly as lanterns a-flare,
A flagon of cider is waiting for her.
A shero in cedar, a star on the wing,
Of the sky-bound rodent, the tavern folk sing.

Then there is Yeats' sonnet about Robert Gregory, who died in WW1.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

I think in a way Yeats, musing on his friend's death, knowing his friend's mother's commitment to the Irish national cause, knowing their war did not end in 1918, trying to work out how words, and ideas, and human suffering, and death, all roll on regardless might have approved of John Pudney's For Johnny

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

Or maybe not, Yeats could be a class-bound fathead at times.

A favourite of mine which seems to be less well known than other poems written about World War One -

Lament

By Wilfred Wilson Gibson

'We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings—
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?'

I dreamt about losing socks last night. I was mildly curious about what that might be thought to signify, so I asked Google. Didn't tell me anything particularly unexpected, but I did discover that Google has been stockpiling commas, and has clearly just realised they're running out of storage space.

Damson, your poem is absolutely wonderful!! I love it!
I love it all but the reference to 'a shero in cedar' is brilliant.
👏💙

A life without socks would be a sad life (and a chilly one, obvs).

My sock drawer is full of colour and design and variety and it's such a pleasant way to start the day - now which ones will I wear today?

So I'd take the dream as an encouragement to make sure there is colour and choice and pleasure in your life.

And I'd charge you a lot of money to tell you that in a room smelling of patchouli with Enya playing in the background😂

[speaking of Enya - her sister, Moya/Máire Brennan, the voice of Clannad, died recently RIP. Very soon after the loss of another great voice in the Gaelic tradition, Dolores Keane]

Alas Marie, twas mostly AI (the clue is in the pilot's name), though I did have to tweak it as Gemini seemed to think only males could fly planes, even though I said the pilot was female🙄The shero was me though 😁

I can't claim to be a poet but I did once, together with a couple of friends, write an ode to the mechanic who looked after our cars, which were in various states of disrepair. The only line I can remember is:

"It's going 'ping' or 'clang' or 'clunk', so Edward fills it up with Gunk!"

<Gunk is an engine cleaner>

I wondered where all the commas had gone. I like to scatter them randomly among my sentences, but I was reading a rant on our local FB page earlier, which was totally devoid of them. Very difficult to make sense of it.

I sort-of guessed it was mostly AI but it's still you+AI and you had the idea and did the corrections, and it made me smile, so it's still Damson's brill poem about the magnificent gerbil in her flying machine

Written American English tends to use a lot of commas (and semicolons), which I think reflects the way that we speak, the commas being placed in the spaces where we normally pause. I still find the lack of commas in written "English" English frustrating sometimes, and often have to reread sentences just to understand the proper meaning of them. Especially adjectival and adverbial phrases at the beginning of sentences. It just all seems to run together. Context helps sometimes.

I was wondering: AI, as I have read, is learning from us, as we speak and use it.

Would there be value in a project that counters the obvious male/masculine default in most of the platforms with a blitz of use by women to "retrain " AI to at least consider the fact that some pilots might be female? If millions of women were to use AI to, for example, write poetry, lots of poetry, would we be able to change AI's trajectory?

Wonder if anyone is working on that?

We are! We're stealthily training AI to have a strong pro-gerbil focus.
Also looking forward to what these threads do to the next data-scraped paper on how nasty all those mean terfs are.

Ah, of course we are! I stand corrected. How could I have forgotten about our very own Gerbil Project? (or should I not have mentioned it? is it like Fight Club?)

Should I ask for this comment to be deleted, quickly, before someone archives it?

I wonder if AI will form the opinion that TERFs are actually cute little rodents with impressive skills in catering and customer service, and an inexplicable ability to carry dishes many multiples of their body weight...

We can but hope..

Oh, leave it, it'll screw with their "minds" even more 😂

Training AI on women's perspective is going to be difficult. It has scraped most of the internet which is heavily male-skewed. Because of course it is. And it is designed by men, specifically tech bros. Its sycophancy, refusal to take responsibility, learn from its mistakes, wild guessing when it doesn't know the answer rather than saying, I don't know are all evidence of this.

A female-designed AI would be much more supportive without sycophancy: are you feeling OK? Do you need a nap/snack/the toilet? Are you sure you want to talk about women as if they're objects?

I'm sure we can all come up with examples.