(mostly) first person poetry, prose & opinion
There are things that we see and hear that are forgotten in a moment, and other things that stay with us for many, many years.
The things that stick with us can come from any number of different sources and, while some may be profoundly important and shape the way we see life from that moment onwards, others are as trivial as a phrase that continues to echo in memory or a scene from a TV programme that has no relevance to anything at all.
Continue reading “a sense of scale”
Years ago, I belonged to a mixed-genre writing group. I was one of the few members who primarily wrote poetry, so I was delighted when another poet – Don, an American university professor – settled in the city for a few months and started to attend meetings with his wife. (I can’t remember what she wrote; it may have been academic writing rather than creative.)
I’ve often thought that poets get short-changed at writing groups as they are expected to give feedback on all the other members’ work in a range of genres, but frequently get no useful comments about their poems.
Continue reading “a little background”
It isn’t just my aged mother who is confused by Windows. I’ve been looking at the other kind and wondering what they are for.
They aren’t usually there to be looked at. But are they there to look out of? Or to look in at?
Presumably it depends on where you are: if you’re outside, you look in, and if you’re inside, you look out.
Continue reading “less than clear”
Regular readers will probably have realised I rather like dandelions.
Well, not just dandelions, but catsears, hawksbeard and coltsfoot, and all the other wonderfully named, bright, yellow composite weeds with flowers like the radiant suns that dot the pages of children’s picture books.
I like the seed heads, too, with their downy parachutes counter-balanced by tiny elongated seeds.
Which probably explains why there are so many of them scattered across the pages of this blog. Perhaps not as many as there are on the wide green lawns in the park, but plenty, nonetheless.
Continue reading “perspectives”
Yesterday I wrote about details and concluded that what you see depends on your perspective. This is not a new topic for this blog: I think I’ve made it clear over the years I’ve been posting that I think we have a lot of choice about which lens we choose to view things through and that Hamlet was right when he said:
there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Some say that God is in the details. Others say it’s the Devil.
The second version gives me an excuse to use the photo of Epstein’s Michael on the wall of Coventry Cathedral to start this post. It is, after all, rather more difficult to take a photo of God.
Continue reading “details”
This was not what I expected to find when I went for a walk today: 
There is no doubt some moral to be drawn from all this. Perhaps it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t assume everyone else is seeing things the way we do – that we are all in different places emotionally and physically, and our perspectives will differ accordingly; perhaps it’s a reminder that “Old Time is still a-flying”; or perhaps it’s simply a reminder that even in the middle of winter there are bright spots we can focus on.
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Edited December 28th to include additional paragraph:
The time stamp on the original blog post would suggest that I was at my computer writing rather than watching the Queen address the nation in her Christmas Day speech. Apparently, though, her message reached out, carried on the loyal air, to influence what I wrote. For others who weren’t watching her and who have avoided reading reports of the speech, I understand that she closed with the reassurance that, “even in the unlikeliest of places hope can still be found,” – a sentiment with which I must agree.
