Today is midsummer’s day, a fact that always confused me as a child: if June 21st was the first day of summer and the 24th was midsummer, did that mean it was all over on the 27th?
Actually, given British summers, it wasn’t that really all that confusing. Perhaps if I’d known then about the St John’s bonfires, I’d have thought it quite reasonable that you might need to light a fire to keep warm even in late June.
June 24th was my grandmother’s birthday and the photo is from a poetry book she was given by my grandfather. It seems appropriate, then, to find a poem to post today.
I expect she’d have preferred something a lot more traditional – I think the dedication was in a collection of Keats – but this at least includes sunshine, even if not specifically summer:
The one that got away
What was caught on that fishing-line
of light held taut between the trees,
pulled silent,
slow,
lower
and lower
as the sun sank?
don't confuse the narrator 