animals – Page 19 – don't confuse the narrator

a visitor

Yesterday I started to worry at a draft poem that I found in my notebook. It was started a year ago and is provisionally called Monsters.

The appearance of the creature in the photo on my verandah today was entirely fortuitous.

That picture doesn’t give much idea of scale, but if you click you’ll see her full length. She was a good two tiles long and they are 24 cm across. (So, allowing for the ripples, I suppose she was around 18 inches from nose to tail tip.)*
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doggerel

Looking through my files for a poem with a dog in it to go with this photo, I am slightly surprised just how few there seem to be. There are plenty of cats. And then there are dog ends and dog shit, dog-tooth waistcoats and quite a bit of barking, but very few actual dogs.
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a flock of bird thoughts

A fragment of an old poem to start off with:

Under the apple treee, a prattle
of tabby-feathered sparrows anticipates
the flick and snap of chequered tablecloth
that signals their breadcrumb breakfast.

I was reminded of the image because I had a newspaper clipping sent to me the other day – yes, there are still people who read printed newspapers, albethey freebies, and who cut out things other than coupons to send on accompanied by real letters to specific people, rather than glancing superficially at on-line phrases and sending irrelevant links to everyone in their email address book. It was a cutting about the Spanish sparrow who is causing a furore in a coastal village in Hampsire.
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more bats and bell towers

Yesterday I quoted Claude Debussy as having said:

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

I’d found the quotation on the web, but, as with so much information out there today, there was no source cited and no original French.

So I went looking and found this in a footnote of Debussy: his life and mind, Volume 1 by Edward Lockspeiser:

J’ai en ce moment l’âme gris-fer et de tristes chauves-souris tournent au clocher de mes rêves!

Which makes it look as if the quotation is genuine.
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(not) a batting title

blue sky with faint clouds and oak tree buds

Against a spring-blue sky
the twitch and loop of flickering wings
says: pipistrelle!

Of course it’s saying it in Spanish, and I see from the IberiaNature glossary that there are some two dozen species of murciélago in Spain, so I may be mis-hearing what’s being said.
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