The tail end of summer always makes me slightly nostalgic.
Every time I see blackberries growing in the hedgerow, I remember that one of the few good things about going back to school after the long summer holidays was knowing that we would go blackberrying the next weekend. 
It’s September and the summer is drifting away. At times, the year seems content to grow old gracefully.
Each morning, I dutifully water the patch of ornamental gourds I planted in an attempt to cover some of the chain link fence between us and the neighbours. And each day I am amazed at the size and colour of the flowers.
Since the flowers first appeared a couple of weeks ago, a line of poetry has been running through my head. I’m not sure whether it’s triggered by the suspicion that gourds and melons must be related, by the brightness of the flowers or by the similarity of the sounds of gourd and gaudy…
Continue reading “melon yellow”
St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain;
St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair
Judging from the colour of the sky behind the apples, we’re in for a long hot summer.
Instead they tell me today is San Buenaventura, a saint known for his “simplicity, humility and charity”. Since he seems unlikely to provide the rain needed for apple christening, perhaps it’s just as well we fixed the tap in the orchard at the weekend.
Is there a poet in the land
who can resist that moon, those stars,
who is not sitting, pen in hand
recounting how love leaves her scars?[…]
Enraptured by the moon’s bright light,
I, too, am writing poems tonight.
(Well, I was, some 15 years ago, which is when those lines originated as part of a tetrameter sonnet with heavy end stopping and extraordinarily unimaginative rhymes. The worst thing about learning more about poetry is that I try and write fewer bad poems and end up just writing less.)
don't confuse the narrator 