nature – Page 20 – don't confuse the narrator

brown study

Well, it’s not the study itself that’s brown, but many of the small objects on the shelf are. Some are natural, others man-made; some were gifts, while others were picked up around the garden and elsewhere.
Continue reading

swallows II

Dark blades slice through the air, turn
sideways to the sun, flash silver, turn
into bright fish that glide in endless blue.

There are no swallows in the picture as they move too fast for my limited photography skills. The sky, on the other hand, is never-ending blue and doesn’t pose the same problems.

The post title is “swallows II” because this is not the first poem I have posted about swallows.

camouflage

The Jersey Tiger moth seems to be doing it wrong:

This makes me wonder about all the other creatures in the ivy hedge who have their camouflage right. Which makes lying in the hammock rather less enticing.

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.

timber!

I went for a walk the other evening and found my path blocked by a tree.

There are, of course, a host of literary connections I could make: Birnam Wood; the Ents of Middle-Earth; the “very, very country dance” of the Narnian trees that Lucy dances her way through to reach Aslan in Prince Caspian; the trees that “walk[…] down the side of the cutting” in the landslide scene of The Railway Children…
Continue reading