Once again, the poetry cogs in my brain don’t seem to be turning very fast. 
misreading
I become more and more dependent on my glasses, but even when I am wearing them, letters dance on the page – and they do so even more when the text is on the screen.
The following sprang from a misreading of a perfectly normal expression:
Phrases of the moon
A single quotation mark
opens the discourse, which swells
to a full-mouthed ‘O’, then fades;
a silver comma follows, and then
silence.
a bee in her pocket
Last time I found a carpenter bee in my pocket, it was alive – at least until I stuck my hand in to find out what was in there and it stung me.
Today, though, the poor thing was already dead when I reached in thinking I must have left a tissue in my pocket when my jeans went in the wash.
I suppose if didn’t put my clothes on straight from the washing line, both of them might have lived, but who irons jeans?
The photo is only intended to give an idea of the size of the creature, and explain why, even desiccated in death, its bulk could be mistaken for a paper hanky. I put the keys there to give an idea of scale, and then remembered this old poem:
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the weight of the world
I suspect I’m one of the few women of my age group who has never been on a diet; I was a skinny child and my mother used to tell me I wouldn’t put on weight until I got “a contented mind”.
I’m not sure that’s what happened, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore all the media hype about obesity and health: what used to be reserved for the pages of women’s magazines seems to have spilled over into the general press, and I’ve been aware for a while that my BMI is up at the top end of the acceptable range.
The latest article to catch my eye is on the BBC Health page, entitled “Where are you on the global fat scale?”.
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fragmented sunshine
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the heat, everything slows down for the summer in Spain, so I’m finally getting time to think about revising some old poems.
This fragment comes from a far longer piece, but I think it’s worth posting it as a stand-alone, particularly as the blog is in dire need of an update:
the sun flowers
and sheds its petalled light
into the corners
of our unswept lives
don't confuse the narrator 