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.
Continue reading “permission granted”
This morning, I wanted to make a pun on the idea of a poet as a “maker” and a poem as “a made thing”; before I did so, though, I went to Google to check that I had the etymology right. What I found reminded me of those IQ test questions where you fill in the next word in a set or in a sequence.
Here the sequence starts “poet, poem, poetry,” but the final word is not the one I would have expected:
Recently, I seem to be waking very early. One morning when I checked the time it was four minutes past four; it occured to me I should be writing a poem with the line “4:04: sleep not found”. 
That idea didn’t seem to go anywhere, but here are a few pre-dawn lines:
awake again at 4 am
birdsong weaves around the house;
the chorus swells and fades
in fugal waves of sibilance
to spin a spell that teases out
the softening grey.
The most that can be said of the recent weather is that it has been very English. Glorious sunshine and torrential rain.
Yesterday’s mix of seasons brought a stunning double rainbow over the back garden. The photo shows only one of the bows and doesn’t do that justice, I’m afraid.
don't confuse the narrator 