Poems: 1. Serenity prayer. 2. Cloths of heaven – and bread unleaven. Memory stick reference: 12D:\Silverlining\Creative Writing\Regular sessions\19-4-5-2-2025-7533+.rtf Page 1 of 5

 

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1. Serenity prayer

Serenity prayer

For those feeling not quite all there

Something to share

Invented

or at least presented

By Alcoholics Anonymous

Founded by 3 Reformed Protestants in the USA

I have to say

Then spread through

Other fellowships of steps of 12

For us to delve

Recommended as an essential part of fighting addiction and/or bad habits

Blessed by the then Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Bishop of Australia

Critiqued by feminists in their steps of 16

Identifying what is really your full responsibility and what is that of society, that´s about what they are keen

The most important advice the feminists give

If you want to live

Is step 16

If this doesn't work

Poems: 1. Serenity prayer. 2. Cloths of heaven – and bread unleaven. Memory stick reference: 12D:\Silverlining\Creative Writing\Regular sessions\19-4-5-2-2025-7533+.rtf Page 1 of 5

Feel free to try other things

Finding what does work

But, don´t shirk!

2. Cloths of heaven – and bread unleaven

W.B.Yeats

Regarded as one of the greats

Wrote of a wonderful journey to Byzantium, meaning to New Rome,

As a spiritual home,

Constantinople, now part of Istanbul,

to which it was the pull

But, like Manuel Torga

the Portuguese dual professor of Medicine

And Portuguese as a Foreign Language

in the most ancient seat of Learning there,

of which I am also an alumnus,the University of Coimbra

He failed to understand

That the essence of the city of Constans

Was not their perennialism

Or paganism

But the Truth of True Orthodoxy

For which there is no proxy

Because it means correct or upstanding glory

Or doctrine, which must, to complete the story

Be accompanied by Orthopraxis, or correct action

Or else it is worse than no transaction!

Version 2: 2. Cloths of heaven – and bread unleaven

[With additional verse in parenthesis]

W.B.Yeats

Regarded as one of the greats

Wrote of a wonderful journey to Byzantium, meaning to New Rome,

As a spiritual home,

Constantinople, now part of Istanbul,

to which it was the pull

But, like Manuel Torga

the Portuguese dual professor of Medicine

And Portuguese as a Foreign Language

in the most ancient seat of Learning there,

of which I am also an alumnus,the University of Coimbra

He failed to understand

That the essence of the city of Constans

Was not their perennialism

Or paganism

But the Truth of True Orthodoxy

For which there is no proxy

Because it means correct or upstanding glory

Or doctrine, which must, to complete the story

Be accompanied by Orthopraxis, or correct action

Or else it is worse than no transaction!

[This was unlike Dostoevski,

the one-time revolutionary firebrand,

delivered a pardon as he was about to face his last stand,

From which there would be no way back, for his bod,

Execution by firing squad,

In a standard ruse

By Tsar Nicholas I

To encourage people, their minds to peruse

And to have the opportunity to relent,

And repent,

Rather than being assigned,

Eternally maligned,

To an eternally damning hearse!

By then ceasing to rave,

Instead writing what could help save,

Dostoevski surpassed the heretics Nicholas Breakspeare,

Remembered as the only (Normano)-English, and post-Great schism of 1054,

Yore,

(H)Adrian I,

And that master of verse,

Though somewhat terse,

William Shakespeare.]