Continue reading “summer wilderness”
coordination
As I understand it (confirmed from doing some reading on the Wildflowers-and-weeds website) lots of flowers such as thistles and dandelions are not really single flowers, but composite flower heads made up of many tiny individual florets.
neighbours and other animals
When we first moved here, the village seemed to be home to a surfeit of satanic and unholy animals. Some belonged to neighbours, some were just wild visitors.
Emilio had a half a dozen goats and his lad used to herd them across the unfenced part of our land to graze in the olive grove: an enduring image is that of a sleek black goat poised, watchful, on a rock or stone wall, or up on two legs under an olive tree. ( I am glad to say that despite the ease with which he assumed this vertical posture, I never heard the horned one speak.)
Continue reading “neighbours and other animals”
soundtrack
above the hum and buzz of insects
the fluttering chatter of songbirds; higher still,
the sour weep and bark of eagles
As I’ve said before (in the old post bluebirds and probably elsewhere) I’m not particularly fond of birds but they tend to crop up a lot in my poetry.
Continue reading “soundtrack”
moon magnetism
Is there a poet in the land
who can resist that moon, those stars,
who is not sitting, pen in hand
recounting how love leaves her scars?[…]
Enraptured by the moon’s bright light,
I, too, am writing poems tonight.
(Well, I was, some 15 years ago, which is when those lines originated as part of a tetrameter sonnet with heavy end stopping and extraordinarily unimaginative rhymes. The worst thing about learning more about poetry is that I try and write fewer bad poems and end up just writing less.)
don't confuse the narrator 