poetry – Page 78 – don't confuse the narrator

afterwards

empty house
dust on the dressing table
cobwebs in her hair brush

No one who lives in the UK needs to be told that the weather continues unabated, and I can’t be the only one who’s thinking that surely now February is here we might expect some proper winter weather rather than all this wind and rain.

The phrase February fill dike came to mind. Googling it I found this article from the Guardian two years ago, which reports that “southern, central and eastern regions […] are teetering on the brink of drought”. It also says, somewhat surprisingly, that February tends to be one of the driest months of the year.

Not wanting to get political, I’ll just mention that I was told as a child that “bad governments bring bad weather.”

Well, whether drought or flood, we seem to have been having bad weather for years. The poem below was written in January 2001:
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new year, new thoughts

A few years back, I wrote the post what’s in the poem, where I said that I didn’t like how poets tend to use an explanatory “blurb” between pieces at readings to tell the audience how they should understand the poem rather than giving listeners the chance to respond for themselves.

This week, though, I attended a poetry reading by Michael Hulse and saw just how well that inter-poem blurb can be used.
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work in progress

Although I understand that the UK weather was dreadful over the holidays, I’m not sure that it was really cold; certainly there are already signs of spring about. Of course we’re bound to get some real winter weather later, so I hope Nature has the good sense to be patient.

Chrysalis

Tight as apple pips,
 buds spiral around
a moss-supple stalk
 anticipating spring
when they will split  
and shake free
 tissue wings.

That’s a draft, and questions remain:
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words & weapons

We went for a drive yesterday and, as usual, I took my camera with me. But I wasn’t really in the mood for taking pictures; I wanted to see things for myself rather than look at them through a viewfinder. Sadly, that means that although I have a few nice pictures of a reservoir, I missed a really good shot of black cows straggling across the Spanish hillside and another of a herd of bracken-coloured goats grazing on the scrubby roadside.

We also saw an elderly rustic walking down the middle of the road carrying a seriously dangerous-looking rifle, apparently stalking something. I didn’t take a picture of him, either, but that was mainly because I think that pointing a camera at a man with a gun is not the wisest of acts.
Continue reading “words & weapons”