In the Chinese calendar, the year of the rooster starts today, 28th January 2017, so it seems a good reason to have some cockerels, roosters and chickens on the blog this weekend.
The photo at the top was taken at the Bristol Balloon Festival some ten years ago. I feel it’s a bit cartoonish to go with this poetry vignette of dawn breaking in the Spanish pueblo where I used to live, but I don’t seem to have many photos on file that are right for the topic.
Alarm
The neighbour’s rooster wakes
and flings his morning warning
to the hills. The echoes stretch
a string between hoarse-throated brays
and barks that tumble to the still-grey sky.
The top photo was taken in the early morning, when the sky was indeed still grey. Being England in high summer, it may well have stayed grey all day, but twelve hours earlier it provided a rather prettier backdrop:
Who ever said chickens can’t fly?
don't confuse the narrator 