cat’ku

Looking for something summery to post for San Juan, I found this:

sunny verandah
a scattering
of kittens and kibble

Cat family lounging on sunny verandah

The photo appears to have been taken on June 24th, two years ago. The blog post for that day is a proper Midsummer Night poem: noche de san juan.

at the western edge of Europe…

single red hibiscus flower
palm trees, Costa de Adeje, Tenerife

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

palm fronds prick at a volcanic sky
and bright hibiscus
leer at pink-skinned foreigners.

Continue reading “at the western edge of Europe…”

the way through the fields

overgrown field
 
I was away for less than a fortnight, but the elderly neighbour has been ill and hasn’t been around with his donkey for a few weeks now.

It seems, then, that the path I take across the field to get onto the road to the village has been ‘repossessed’. (It used to stretch from where the photo was taken almost to the tree and then down to the right.)

I should probably write a poem about it, but I think Rudyard Kipling dealt with the same subject better than I ever will, even if he was writing about woods rather than fields:
Continue reading “the way through the fields”

a visitor

Yesterday I started to worry at a draft poem that I found in my notebook. It was started a year ago and is provisionally called Monsters.

The appearance of the creature in the photo on my verandah today was entirely fortuitous.

snake's head

That picture doesn’t give much idea of scale, but if you click you’ll see her full length. She was a good two tiles long and they are 24 cm across. (So, allowing for the ripples, I suppose she was around 18 inches from nose to tail tip.)*
Continue reading “a visitor”

ephemera

giant dandelion globe

Along the bridle path
brief worlds
flower and fade

 
 
The words are really only an excuse to post the photo. Sadly, even if you click the picture to enlarge it, it isn’t clear that the ‘dandelion’ globe was around three inches in diameter (approximately 8 cm).

I had to make do with my phone camera yesterday and of course by the time I’d re-charged my camera and went out this morning, there was nothing left. Perhaps I’ll catch the other bud at the right moment.