poetry – Page 63 – don't confuse the narrator

temptation

I came across this gorgeous rosebud recently: a vivid splash of colour on an essentially monochrome day.

The weather had been erratic and I was sure there would be a storm within a few hours that would destroy the flower’s perfection; I wondered fleetingly whether the house owners would miss it if I “removed” it before that could happen. Instead, I settled for taking pictures.
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a poem for every occasion

Two months ago, the rolling green of Middle England was covered in purple and I wrote on the blog that the rosebay willow herb is one of my favourite summer flowers.

Tangled rosebay willow herb after seeding

Today, the countryside is every bit as green, but the bright aspirational flower spikes have long gone and the feathery thought-like seeds have been carried away on the wind.

Nothing is left but a dried up scribble of empty seed pods, which perfectly matches the barren tangle of my mind at the moment.
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on trend

When I set the blog up, it was deliberately anonymous; now, it’s perfectly possible to connect the dots and find out who does the writing here. Even so, I don’t usually post pictures or other details about myself, so this is an exception.

Green grass, orange & white boat, blue sky, granny hair in foreground.

The photo is from the same set as those I posted yesterday, and manages to show the colours I failed to capture in the second picture. It also shows another colour entirely: my natural hair colour.
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memories

Yesterday I was busy choosing poems to read at an event at the local bookshop, so didn’t get round to updating the blog. I had a reading slot of between 15 and 20 minutes and spent all afternoon trying to create some kind of coherent ‘set’.
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light relief

Midnight Moths owl: Birmingham Big Hoot Art Trail. Artist: Alyn Smith

When I told a friend that I’d been looking through old poems trying to find one to send to a competition with the theme darkness, he laughed and said I should find that easy: after all, I write lots of dark poems.

In fact he was wrong. The subject matter isn’t always the most cheerful, but I do tend to find a bright twist to things. Like the owl in the photo – the Midnight Moths owl from Birmingham’s Big Hoot Art Trail – I can’t help but see the stars.

Coincidentally, yesterday I came across the word eigengrau: the colour that we see when there is zero light.

It seems that even in perfect darkness we don’t actually see black: our optic nerves make us see a dark grey instead. Perhaps we should re-name them optimistic nerves. Perhaps I should write a poem about that.