village life – Page 16 – don't confuse the narrator

the way through the fields

I was away for less than a fortnight, but the elderly neighbour has been ill and hasn’t been around with his donkey for a few weeks now.

It seems, then, that the path I take across the field to get onto the road to the village has been ‘repossessed’. (It used to stretch from where the photo was taken almost to the tree and then down to the right.)

I should probably write a poem about it, but I think Rudyard Kipling dealt with the same subject better than I ever will, even if he was writing about woods rather than fields:
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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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weeds and words

April has brought the cuckoo and forced the lilacs into bloom. Now it’s even bringing a few showers. They don’t seem to be doing much to pierce the drought of March, though, as they barely dampen the surface of the ground and then evaporate with wind and the suddenly dazzle of sunshine.

Still, they are enough to have prompted a few more weeds to flourish and the photo has reminded me of an unfinished poem of frustrated love entitled I want. This is the third stanza:

I want daisies on the lawn in clumps
of seven to fit my footstep, a universe
of dandelion globes and the chance
a simple breath can make it
any time I like.

Down by the river the other day, it would have been easy enough to put your foot on seven daisies, but I haven’t seen any in my garden and I’m sure summer isn’t really here yet. Perhaps the river bank is as inaccurate a time keeper as dandelion clocks tend to be.

spring is sprung

Well, Google tells me that it’s the first day of spring today, although to be honest, the sky is more wintry than I’ve seen it in weeks, if not months. So the photos aren’t from today – and they aren’t all from my garden – although they were all taken during the last week:

no change

When I said yesterday that the forecast for the night was ‘sunny’, I should perhaps have added that that was the forecast for today, too.

And for tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, as far as the predictions go, though not, I hope, until the last syllable of recorded time.

The brimstone butterflies would be a better illustration of the hellish weather, but they won’t stay still long enough to be photographed. Instead here’s a peacock butterfly who couldn’t find any green to settle on.