The local piscina natural is now active for the summer and new signs have been painted and displayed. This is one that has escaped the graffiti artists so far:
Some of my pedantic readers will realise quickly enough why I am not impressed.
Continue reading “the leisure business”
I dreamed of you last night and woke
to moonlight, sheet-tangled feet
cat-twisted and cold.I drowsed again, through decades, slipped
between cities and crossed continents,
embracing and embraced,
now chasing and now chased,
no pause between the kisses passed
from partner on to partner
down through the yearning years.I dreamed of you last night
and woke to moonlight.
(St John’s Eve – Midsummer Night – is celebrated across Spain with fire jumping in the street and general festivities. It’s supposed to be a time of powerful magic, and seemed a suitable title for this slightly chaotic dream poem.)
I just pulled one of my grandmother’s poetry books from the shelf. There aren’t that many of them, but they are all inscribed “Midsummer Day” and were gifts from her husband on her birthday. This particular book – Poems by Thomas Hood – is dated exactly 100 years ago.
My favourite Hood poem is The Bridge of Sighs, but that’s too long to post here, so I’ll settle for one that’s appropriate to the time as well as the date:
Continue reading “midsummer night”
One of the joys of speaking two languages is that you get far more opportunities for puns than monolinguists do.
It was with delight, then – and with a language hiccough mid-way – that I saw the following on the El País website earlier today: 
The word verse flipped my mind into English and conjured the wonderful image of Obama and McChrystal having a flyting contest.
Ragged leaf veils
geometrical precision:
butterfly eggs.
In case anyone cares what sort of leaf it is, it’s a kiwi leaf, and the ones above are grape vines. And there is, indeed, something odd about the chaotic tumble of vines juxtaposed with the tiny perfect arrangement of insect eggs.
don't confuse the narrator 