In no particular order, and with no revision, a few notes that may find their way into poems later on:
Five days torrential rain, then:
Sparkling sunshine;
the orchard
smells of cider.Mushroom white
figs moulder on the bridle path;
I slip and slime
down to the road.
Continue reading “December images”
Having been reminded recently that I am not as familiar with the works of P. G. Wodehouse as I should be, I downloaded an audio copy of The Clicking of Cuthbert to listen to.
It’s slightly surreal to walk around rural Spain with something so eminently English sounding in my head, and it does mean that I am liable to reply in English to any neighbourly salutation, but I don’t find as much time for reading as I’d like and some of the free audio books from librivox.org are an absolute delight, even if they are read by amateurs.
Continue reading ““good enough for Keats””
The first time I heard the phrase Hoy por ti; mañana por mí I was amazed at the no-nonsense approach to helping others that it seemed to encapsulate.
The closest we seem to come to it in English is “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”, though I don’t think that’s quite the same, as the English idiom implies a real one-to-one reciprocity.
Continue reading “hoy por ti”
From his aerial perch
a starling
chips at the wintering sky
I’m much better at recognising birds when I see them than by their calls, but I’ve started to recognise the jays and the azure winged magpies, though I really only know one from the other by the number of voices heard at once; the hoopoe is quite familiar, too, and I’ve now come to associate a sort of hollow rattling cackle with the starlings. (I was going to describe the noise as a ‘grackle’, but find that that is actually the name of a bird, which is a bit confusing.)
Continue reading “bird on a wire”
When the white clouds lifted, they left behind
a hint of snow along the mountain ridge. The sky
is blue as any summer’s day and I walk to the village
in unbroken sunshine. On the way back, a neighbour
eases his donkey from amble to pause and greets me.
He wants some windfall apples “pa’ el guarro”. I agree,
but would so much prefer to let the patient burro
mumble fruit from my palm, not help to fatten
the squealing pig for Martinmas.
(First draft – which means I’ve only rewritten it half a dozen times and juggled the line breaks back and forth and to and fro, but haven’t added in additional material or stepped back from it very far.)
Continue reading “winter approaches”
don't confuse the narrator 