L’Escala: thunder blue,
the Mediterranean
beat her lace-frilled cuffs against
the coast’s ridged washboard rocks
while the cobla band played on
in brassy silence.
You’ll find a couple of other poetry fragments from my recent trip to Catalonia if you click here.
Spring pours sunshine
through the woods to dapple
on my polished shoes.I hear birdsong echo
children’s laughter; green
is a scent, a taste
fresh on my tongue.
(The opening lines of an old poem.)
News websites change rapidly, so one headline that particularly caught my attention – “Clegg attacks Tory knife crime plan” – is no longer to be found. I’d made a note of it, though, as that badly chosen verb “attack” bothered me.
For a bored subeditor, making up punny headlines can be fun, but I think there’s a point when serious news should be treated seriously. (True, my post title is slightly frivolous, but this is a personal blog not an official news provider.)
Continue reading “news at the cutting edge”
La tramuntana
turns the beach
vertical, lifting it
towards a cleanswept blue
where tiptilting gulls
fly backwards.
It’s not quite the right photo, of course, but the tramontane wind blew so hard for four of the five days of my recent trip that I couldn’t see or think or focus. I could hardly stand upright most of the time, so was pleased to find even a few lines of poetry, without worrying about whether I had appropriate pictures to use alongside.
A painter’s light, you said,
but I saw nothing,
eyes scrunched against
drifting sand and tufts
of cottonwood.
I leave it to the reader to guess which is which:
Continue reading “blowing my own trumpet”
don't confuse the narrator 