pueblo – Page 6 – don't confuse the narrator

plagues & pests

A BBC website headline announces “‘Black Death pit’ unearthed”, and is followed up with a story starting:

Excavations for London’s Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death.

When I read the news, my first thought was of Quatermass and the Pit, so I hope they don’t find any bugs like the one in the photo.

The bug – a langosta in Spanish – has been there for weeks, hibernating discreetly on the bead curtain. At one point there were two of them (hibernating discretely, I suppose).

It looks like a grasshopper to me, but langosta translates as locust, so I guess I should just be glad we don’t have a plague of them.

Which bring us full circle to the Black Death and that burial ground.

Well, I’m back in the pueblo and the weather is wet and wild. Yesterday evening there was a brief pause in the downpour, though, and I managed to take a few pictures. (As always, you can click each photo to see a larger version.)

I love the way the raindrops and buds work together, but I need to practise more to get the pictures I really want. A little sunshine might help, too.

closeup of early buds on plum tree with raindrop

poems from the pueblo

Some of the short poems from this blog have been brought together with others in an eBook: Poems from the pueblo: Haiku & assorted fragments.

There are several formats available for download:

• FREE iPad-only version from the iBookStore. Watch the publisher’s video to find out more about this fully-enhanced ebook:
(The video has music, so you may want to check your volume control.)

Just read/watched/listened to your #PoemsFromThePueblo. What a little treasure box! And love the whole interactive thing. – Elizabeth Hopkinson, fantasy writer, sent via twitter from her Hidden Grove.

• Download the FREE ePub version direct from Tantamount. (This version includes embedded sound files which will only be accessible if your reader supports sound.)

• Or buy it from Amazon.

I’m hoping there will be more poems from the pueblo – both further collections of fragments and, eventually, a collection of the more substantial poems I have written while living in the Spanish hinterlands.

You’ll find full information about my books over on my website. Feedback and reviews are always appreciated.

a hook to hang things on

I typed “a hook” into the Google search box and was surprised to see that the first auto-complete option was “a hook in writing”.

At the moment, I have no idea of how to grab my readers’ attention half as effectively as this photo is likely to, nor do I have any ideas for a poem that might be hung alongside the image.

So I guess I’ll just have to leave you all in suspense…

sun, snow, sierra

Yesterday at 9am it was still so dark I was hardly able to see whether the garden was still there or whether it had either disappeared under flood-water or been blown away by the wind. Today, though, at around 8:30am: