Day: April 16, 2025

Six fathers and one widow arrested on Ash Wednesday 1519 in Coventry, England.
The charge, teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English.

Learning and saying the Lord’s Prayer back then in any language other than Latin was illegal. The punishment was a fiery death on the stake.

The widow was set free, maybe because she was a widow with no husband to help raise her children.

But, when she was escorted home by a bishop, he found a document in her sleeve containing The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Articles of Faith, and she was arrested again and imprisoned.

The seven were condemned to death. They were tied to three stakes and burned until dead in a place called The Little Park April 4th, 1519:

Master Archer, Thomas Bond, Master Hawkins, Robert Hockett, Thomas Landial, Master Wigham, Mistress Smith.

Bob Boyd

You see her in a hotel room
You freak out
Your body freezes
Goose bumps rise
You’re filled with dread
But Amanda isn’t there
She’s not conscious
And she cannot interact
She’s just an imprint
A loop that
Plays a moment
Over and over
She died from
A dramatic event
And Amanda
Moved on
March of 1966

Bob Boyd

She said what about that poem you wrote about reading a bird’s mind?
I said, I’m a jester at times, kidding about things I don’t believe in.
But what about your spiritual experiences and the kundalini energy in you, she said?
I said, those aren’t psychic powers, just natural manifestations in one’s spiritual life.
She cited people with alleged psychic powers she’d read about.
I said don’t believe what you’ve read. They’ve all been debunked.
I’d like there to be an abundance of psychic powers … if
they could be used for the good of humankind and to better the world.
But I just don’t believe anyone has bona fide paranormal powers.

Bob Boyd

She started sensing
spirits in her house.
Sometimes following her.
Sometimes touching her.
She began seeing the spirits
and her plants started to die
until it was discovered she
was being poisoned by
a carbon dioxide leak in
her furnace that when
fixed the spirits ceased
and her plants came back
to life.

Bob Boyd

She was told she had terminal cancer, a year to live
and said the cancer treatments made her lustful.
She divorced her husband of ten years and spent her
final days sleeping with as many men as she could.
I never understood her thinking. Many would be
acting better in this life hoping for a better afterlife.
Perhaps she was an atheist and wanted to get in
as much sex and pleasure as she could before
she passed on into a bleak and empty nothingness.

Bob Boyd

She wasn’t born into the money and the advantages it offered.
Acquiring material things meant little to her.
She didn’t need expensive clothes and an exorbitant lifestyle.
With those things she wasn’t consumed.
She enjoyed simple things and simple pleasures.
She wasn’t obsessed with always seeking more money and possessions.
She disdained the extravagant life. She lived for her art and for love.
And though she never made much money with her art and died
an unknown artist, she had a better richer life than those
who were trapped on the treadmill of striving for money and material things.

Bob Boyd