don't confuse the narrator

blazing a trail

I flew to Spain on Wednesday. We boarded on time, but sat on the tarmac for a couple of hours while they fixed a technical problem.

This was the view through the window just after take off:

Despite appearances, I don’t think it was the warp drives they fixed, as we were still two hours late at the other end.

This morning, I wanted to make a pun on the idea of a poet as a “maker” and a poem as “a made thing”; before I did so, though, I went to Google to check that I had the etymology right. What I found reminded me of those IQ test questions where you fill in the next word in a set or in a sequence.

Here the sequence starts “poet, poem, poetry,” but the final word is not the one I would have expected:

derivation of word "poem". Google results

seeing red

I never collected butterflies as a child, never owned a killing jar, never pinned spread wings flat on boards or boasted of my trophies to visitors. I did, however, own a butterfly net made from a piece of net curtain, a hoop of wire and a bamboo garden cane – well, maybe my brother owned it and I acquired it – which features in the poem Childhood posted last autumn.

I could also identify just about every adult butterfly in the book, though I was less expert when it came to caterpillars.

Last week, then, when I came across the lovely creature in the photo, I knew it wasn’t a butterfly at all. It had to be a moth. In fact it’s a cinnabar moth, and common enough that I am surprised I’d never seen one before.

The final lines of the poem Childhood are:

The butterflies have flown away;
their colours paint my dreams.

I’m wondering now if in fact it is moths like this that add that dash of dream colour.

bees and birds

Last week I wrote a post – summing up – in which I did a quick round up of some of my recent writing activities. I think I hoped to give the impression that I was a real busy bee.

But not every insect that fumbles the flowers is a bee.

Similarly, not all frantic activity is genuinely useful. I wonder how much of my busy-ness is real, and how much is just headless-chickening.

Duck: female mallard dabbling in river. Head not visible

en route

On a walk the other night, I came across this sign:

Kenilworth Greenway - a permissisve bridleway with kissing gates

I rather like the idea of a “permissive bridleway”, but I like it even more knowing that it has kissing gates installed along its route.

As the seond photo shows, the path also has way markers that hang out on the verge [sic] dressed in their glad rags.

I think perhaps I should be writing a poem entitled In summer, the permissive bridleway puts on its finery, but I fear that would be the high point of the piece and I would be unable to do it justice.