writing – Page 28 – don't confuse the narrator

permission granted

I had an email early this week asking for permission to include three of my limericks in an English school workbook, which is to be published in September ready for the new academic year. This wasn’t really a surprise as I’d agreed with the author back in February that she could use them. Even so, I had half forgotten our conversation and wasn’t sure when the book was due out or when I might hear.
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logic test

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:

derivation of word "poem". Google results

seeing red

I never collected butterflies as a child, never owned a killing jar, never pinned spread wings flat on boards or boasted of my trophies to visitors. I did, however, own a butterfly net made from a piece of net curtain, a hoop of wire and a bamboo garden cane – well, maybe my brother owned it and I acquired it – which features in the poem Childhood posted last autumn.

I could also identify just about every adult butterfly in the book, though I was less expert when it came to caterpillars.

Last week, then, when I came across the lovely creature in the photo, I knew it wasn’t a butterfly at all. It had to be a moth. In fact it’s a cinnabar moth, and common enough that I am surprised I’d never seen one before.

The final lines of the poem Childhood are:

The butterflies have flown away;
their colours paint my dreams.

I’m wondering now if in fact it is moths like this that add that dash of dream colour.

en route

On a walk the other night, I came across this sign:

Kenilworth Greenway - a permissisve bridleway with kissing gates

I rather like the idea of a “permissive bridleway”, but I like it even more knowing that it has kissing gates installed along its route.

As the seond photo shows, the path also has way markers that hang out on the verge [sic] dressed in their glad rags.

I think perhaps I should be writing a poem entitled In summer, the permissive bridleway puts on its finery, but I fear that would be the high point of the piece and I would be unable to do it justice.

snail mail

This morning I went to the local post office to send a book to a friend. There are two separate counters, one for general goods, and one for official post office purchases, so, since I had to buy a padded envelope, I had to get receipts from both tills. The envelope cost me 70p.

Years ago, I worked in a school where the secretary kept a box with pens, glue, scissors etc; it was labelled stationary box because it was not to be moved from her desk under any circumstances. My father had taught me that stationery was what was sold by the stationer (the -er- matches) so I understood the joke.

Today when I got home, I checked the till receipt. Now I am wondering whether the parcel will ever arrive; I think I bought an envelope that is going nowhere: