Against a spring-blue sky
the twitch and loop of flickering wings
says: pipistrelle!
Of course it’s saying it in Spanish, and I see from the IberiaNature glossary that there are some two dozen species of murciélago in Spain, so I may be mis-hearing what’s being said.
Continue reading “(not) a batting title”
Surely it’s April that should be “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”, not January? But here the buds are already beginning to show signs of breaking into life.
Mind you, unless there’s some rain soon, I don’t quite know how much energy the trees will have for producing flowers, especially as I forgot to dead head them when they finished flowering last year.
At which point, it seems appropriate to post this abandoned draft from a few years back:
Continue reading “a promise of lilacs”
It’s not only the seasons that seem to have shifted here. At this time of year, we should have snow on the mountains; instead it looked more as if we had a volcano out there this morning.
I took this photo today; elsewhere in garden, the violets have been in flower for a couple of weeks. 
I don’t doubt that for everything there is a season. It just isn’t always the one you’d expect it to be.
It’s a piece that I’ve been intending to write ever since we bought the house in the village and were told the guy couldn’t come to prune the trees on the long December puente as he’d be busy with la matanza.
In most parts of Spain, a cada cerdo le llega su San Martín – pigs get what’s coming to them on November 11th – but it seems that in our village it’s more traditional for the pig slaughter to take place on the feast of la Inmaculada.
That juxtaposition of the innocence and virginal white of the immaculate conception with the sheer red-blooded traditional country ritual of pig slaughter seems to be crying out for a poem to be written.
Continue reading “of pigs and poetry”
don't confuse the narrator 