not exactly floral

I seem to have posted a lot of pictures of flowers and fruits recently, which is slightly annoying, as it sometimes seems as if this blog is turning into a photo report of a harvest festival.

This isn’t what I am aiming for, and I am reminded of a question that cropped up when talking about writing some years ago:

What happens if a poet finds his voice and it’s one he doesn’t like?

This blog was never intended to be a photo scrap book, and certainly never intended to feature flowers on every page.

Anyway, after I’d been to the greengrocer’s yesterday, I thought it’d make a change to post a picture of a different type of flower.

Now, though, I’ve realised it simply makes it look even more like harvest festival.

Still, I’m quite used to the fact that I often don’t like the narrator who wants to speak my poems. Even when there’s no particular narrator, I don’t always like the style or the voice of the things I write, so why should it be any different when it comes to photography?

Now, the pictures have got me thinking of the idea of fractals, so here’s a fragment from a poem called Unreasoned argument. I may more or less agree with the optimistic tone taken by the narrator, but she seems to be rather inclined to rant. Or maybe I was just writing a poem that needed to be performed rather than read on the page. Do, please, read it aloud. Preferably with growing enthusiasm.

But if those fractal worlds exist, then,
somewhere, out there, there’s a world
where you and I were right, you never left
because
I never let you down; a world where I

could have,
should have,
would have,
might have… where

I must have been and gone and done, answered
unasked, talked and walked, and lived and loved,
sung and slept, eaten, drunk… and sober, over and over,
fortuitous rippling serendipity leading
to a world where I am me and you and I
are sitting, standing, lying, kissing, crying, where
however many worlds apart, we’re still
together: side by side, we’ll ride
that bifurcating wave into forever.