writing – Page 32 – don't confuse the narrator

great oaks and giant redwoods

Wildflowers and grasses
dwarf my three-year oak.
The spring breeze whispers:
Patience! Time will tell.

Of course the tree in the picture isn’t the “three-year oak”. (Though I think the little one would be quite a bit taller if it hadn’t been accidentally strimmed a couple of times in its first year!)

The photo is of one of the trees on the neighbouring plot.

They tower over our greenhouse and when the wind blows in autumn, acorns skitter across the flat roof and I am tempted to run like Henny Penny to warn everybody that “the sky is falling!”
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pedantry & poetry

"James Anderson becomes only the fourth England player to take 300 Test wickets during the first Test against New Zealand."

Cricket Tests are renowned for how long they last, but the BBC news to the right seems to imply they might go on for weeks: if Anderson was the fourth to take 300 wickets in the first Test, then three others had done so before him.

Just how long does it take for 1200+ wickets to be taken?

Elsewhere on the BBC last week I read their College of Journalism blog post: We all love lists, but are they all journalism?
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clearing away the clouds

First kiss

It’s there in the air between them.

As hands sketch fragmented curves,
fingertips graze its surface.

They worry it with words,
map points along the borders.

Their tongues taste the edges
of possibility until they find its shape

in the space where their lips meet.

I came across an earlier draft of the above in a stack of papers I was about to throw away, but I can’t find any trace of it on my computer. I don’t think I’d deliberately discarded it, but it definitely needed work.

There’s still a way to go, but it’s given me something to think – and write – about.
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towers & translations

I still haven’t explored all the functions of my new digital camera, which means that I occasionally press the wrong button and change the settings by mistake. Suddenly, for example, I find I’ve taken a whole series of pictures of a stationary subject, like this set of the Houses of Parliament.

Frustrating as this is, it has made me start thinking again about the different versions of a poem that arise from the translation process.
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through the square window

The view while I waited for a bus yesterday evening was pretty, but the wooden bus shelter added new perspectives as each separate frame of the window offered a different story: