Today is midsummer’s day, a fact that always confused me as a child: if June 21st was the first day of summer and the 24th was midsummer, did that mean it was all over on the 27th?
Actually, given British summers, it wasn’t that really all that confusing. Perhaps if I’d known then about the St John’s bonfires, I’d have thought it quite reasonable that you might need to light a fire to keep warm even in late June.
Continue reading “midsummer day”
Looking for something summery to post for San Juan, I found this:
sunny verandah
a scattering
of kittens and kibble
The photo appears to have been taken on June 24th, two years ago. The blog post for that day is a proper Midsummer Night poem: noche de san juan.
palm fronds prick at a volcanic sky
and bright hibiscus
leer at pink-skinned foreigners.
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:
Continue reading “the way through the fields”
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.)*
Continue reading “a visitor”
don't confuse the narrator 