Phil Mostert
AAIA Conference
Bournemouth 2011

Happy the man –Horace [Odes]
Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own: he who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine, the joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power, but what has been, has been, and I have had my hour .

Cloths of Heaven - W B Yeats
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

There was a boy
A very strange, enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he
And then one day,
One magic day he passed my way
While we spoke of many things
Fools and Kings
This he said to me,
The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.

Richard Corey - Edwin Arlington Robinson
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favoured, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich —yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head .

OZYMANDIAS - Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

ELDORADO - Edgar Allan Poe
Gaily bedight, A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long,
Singing a song, In search of Eldorado.
This knight so boldBut he grew old-
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
No spot of ground
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow-
"Shadow," said he, "Where can it be-
This land of Eldorado?"
"Over the Mountains
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Of the Moon,
Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE – W B Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in a bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

If you have ever wondered.. All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in
Kindergarten - Robert Fulgham
Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be,
I learned in Kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandbox at nursery school.
These are the things I learned..
Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup? The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup - they all die. So do we.
And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.
The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and sane living.
Think of what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or if we had a basic policy in our nation and other nations to always put things back where we found them and cleaned up our own messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Smit with those charms, that must decay,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
I grieve to see your future doom;
Untouched thy homed blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power,
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.
No busy hand provoke a tear.
They died--nor were those flowers more gay,
By Nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.
From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came;
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.

… I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. . .
…
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend. . .
…
In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned . . .
…

author unknown
I would rather have one little rose
From the garden of a friend,
Than to have the choicest flowers
When my stay on earth must end.
I would rather have a loving smile
From friends I know are true,
Than tears shed 'round my casket
When to this world I bid adieu.
I would rather have a pleasant word
In kindness said to me,
Than flattery when my heart is still
And life has ceased to be.
Bring me all your flowers today
Whether pink, or white, or red,
I'd rather have one blossom now
Than a truckload when I'm dead.

Austin Clarke
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went –
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

- Michael Coady
Though there are torturers in the world
There are also musicians.
Though, at this moment, men
Are screaming in prisons
There are jazzmen raising storms
Of sensuous celebration
And orchestras releasing
Glories of the spirit.
Though the image of God
Is everywhere defiled
A man in West Clare
Is playing the concertina,
The Sistine Choir is levitating
Under the dome of St Peter’s
And a drunk man on the road
Is singing for no reason.

- Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday weather made blanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

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‘Come,’ said death, choosing her as his partner for the last dance. And she, who in life had done everything with a bird’s grace, opened her bill now for the shedding of one sigh no heavier than a feather.

To all light things
I compared her; to
A snowflake, a feather.
I remember she rested at the dance on my arm, as a bird on its nest lest the eggs break, lest she lean too heavily on our love. Snow melts, feathers are blown away;
I have let her ashes down in me like an anchor.