poetry – Page 138 – don't confuse the narrator

of branches and bunches

Half the people in the village this morning were carrying bunches of flowers and greenery, which reminds me that it must be Domingo de Ramos – Palm Sunday.

Ramo and rama are words I can never get straight. Checking today in the on-line Diccionario de la Real Academia, I see that rama is a branch emerging from the tunk or main stem of a plant. Ramo, on the other hand, is a secondary level branch that emerges from the rama madre, or, perhaps, a rama cortada del árbol. If branches change sex the further they get from the trunk or once they’ve been cut from the tree, no wonder I’m confused.
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lilac-time

Swallowtail butterfly on lilac — but oh, so far from London!

At this time of year, my garden in the Gredos foothills makes me long for Kew, though I doubt very much that they have the same butterflies there.

(The Barrel Organ by Alfred Noyes can be read here.)

cherry white

Having mislaid the cable to connect my camera to the computer I find my blogging is somewhat hampered: it’s easy enough to find things to write about, but I don’t want to make the page all text.

Fortunately, the cherry trees were in blossom last year, the year before and the year before that, so I’ve cheated and found an old photo to illustrate this Housman poem which pretty much describes the countryside round here at the moment. Mind you, I don’t really expect to have another 50 years to “look at things in bloom”, so I’d better get a move on and go out and look at them this spring.
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first day of spring

Although the weather outside (here in central Spain) is hotter than a normal UK summer would be, I’m reminded by Google that today is the first day of spring.

This blog is in desperate need of an update, but if I want to get out there and enjoy the sunshine later on today, I’d better get some work done, so I’ll settle for posting a poem:

Spring

March skies leaked
milky sunshine; now it lies
in primrose pools on the embankment.

From ivydark, zodiac
periwinkles blink, then stare
where caterpillar catkins dance
with bumble bees. Under the trees
a crocus campfire kindles.

Gold permeates the air: the blackbirds
have been drinking
daffodils.

(First published in Poetry Scotland, 2005, which is quite appropriate, as the ideas started to germinate on a visit to Irvine some years ago.)

what is this life…?

Late. Running with the grey herd
across the Manzanares bridge, I pause,
look down from the parapet, attention hooked
on the ess of a cormorant’s neck.
The race resumes; then, on the city side
the first green parakeet of spring
squawks my gaze skywards.