she walks through fields of silver.
Winter cracks under her feet
and the earth breathes
gossamer. In her wake,
the path is damp
and green.
Yes, it’s a bit soon to be thinking of spring. But the rain has at least paused for a day or two; yesterday there was a rainbow, and today, after a slight frost, we have tenuous sunshine, so it’s hard not to feel a little more optimistic.
Every year around this time, there’s a day when I wake up and do a double take: has there been some kind of chemical attack over night to account for the fine yellow powder covering the whole village?
It lasts for a week or more and the dust gets everywhere. Cars are covered with it and it forms a scum round the edge of any puddle that happens to be around. Continue reading “fall-out”
Half the people in the village this morning were carrying bunches of flowers and greenery, which reminds me that it must be Domingo de Ramos – Palm Sunday.
Ramo and rama are words I can never get straight. Checking today in the on-line Diccionario de la Real Academia, I see that rama is a branch emerging from the tunk or main stem of a plant. Ramo, on the other hand, is a secondary level branch that emerges from the rama madre, or, perhaps, a rama cortada del árbol. If branches change sex the further they get from the trunk or once they’ve been cut from the tree, no wonder I’m confused.
Continue reading “of branches and bunches”
At this time of year, my garden in the Gredos foothills makes me long for Kew, though I doubt very much that they have the same butterflies there.
(The Barrel Organ by Alfred Noyes can be read here.)
Having mislaid the cable to connect my camera to the computer I find my blogging is somewhat hampered: it’s easy enough to find things to write about, but I don’t want to make the page all text.
Fortunately, the cherry trees were in blossom last year, the year before and the year before that, so I’ve cheated and found an old photo to illustrate this Housman poem which pretty much describes the countryside round here at the moment. Mind you, I don’t really expect to have another 50 years to “look at things in bloom”, so I’d better get a move on and go out and look at them this spring.
Continue reading “cherry white”
don't confuse the narrator 