have a go - Haiku

Snowdrop time is long over, only "snowdrop green” is  left, covering everything in great abundant swathes. Now is the time they should be dug up and replanted, preferably in the wilder reaches of gardens, on verges, in lightly wooded patches.

Snowdrops will colonise everything, if left undisturbed for long enough.


I found this haiku on the back of a very mundane household shopping list, all items crossed out as purchased. All I know is that it’s mine but when or why I wrote it is a mystery.

snowdrops rising 

from a bed of decay

rotting leaves

giving birth

to innocence.

Drinks Party

Saturday morning between eleven and one.
Neighbours, friends, acquaintances,
people like us,
people one knows.
There is wine. 'French only, I’m afraid', says the host.
'Chardonnay or claret'.
I opt for Chardonnay and set my glass down on a handy table.
Soft drinks for those who don’t want alcohol.
Especially in the morning.

The hostess offers nibbles.
Mini sausage rolls, vol-au-vents, cheesy bits, tiny squares of ham sandwiches,
crusts carefully removed.
'How have you been', we ask.
‘Haven’t seen you for ages’.
‘You’re looking well.’ Obligatory.
'Did you have a nice Christmas?’
We talk about computers and IT,
to show that we are by no means past it.

We are all of retirement age,
although some still work at their chosen profession.
Mostly part-time. ‘To keep my hand in’.
'A little extra cash for holidays and treats'.
One says ‘You know how I love 18th century walnut furniture.
I have my eye on a long-case clock. Very expensive, as you’d expect.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
My knowledge of the value of long-case clocks of any century
is limited.

Looking across the room you see someone you don’t recognise.
Could it be? It can’t be! Yes, it is. Michael.
Goodness, hasn’t he aged since last we met.
He felt my stare, we make eye contact.
He smiles. Ah, yes, a smile makes all the difference.

‘Are you planning a holiday’,
once a favourite opening gambit
as you make your way around the room, mingling.
A year or two ago the answer was ‘yes’;
details followed, a warm feeling of anticipation in the air.
There are fewer now who will undertake the rigours of travelling.
There is much rueful commiseration.
‘The furthest we get is the hour’s drive to the hospital for check-ups’.
‘What with appointments at surgeries, dentists, clinics there’s hardly time left
to get away for a few days.
One just about manages to see family’.
But we are computer-literate, we said so.
The world comes to us now, just a click away.

Legs aching, feeling faint from standing,
I make my way to Andrew, who’s been ill; he's sitting down.
Gratefully, I sink down next to him.
Andrew has no time for small talk.
‘How’s the writing going’, he asks.
I tell him I’ve given up.
He rouses himself, is concerned.
‘That’s bad’, he says, ‘you must continue’.
I make a plan to ask him to lunch.

Time’s up. The morning is over and we kiss our hosts good-bye.
Both cheeks.
On the way out I see Colin. A quick word, must have a quick word.

‘How are you,’ he says. ‘Are you well?’
I look back at the room.
‘Sometimes I could weep’, I say.

Beechnuts

That crackle and crunch underfoot is beech mast.
The big beech is aiming missiles at me from a great height,
and when her aim is true, I feel it.
Ouch!

Once in every five to ten years, they say, can we expect such bounty.
Last year was a good one too, so either they are wrong,
or nature is changing her rhythm.
A hot, dry summer helps.

I have need of a pig.
Could you lend me a pig?
Free of charge to both of us?
I have no acorns but plenty of beechnuts.
But do remember to ring the pig’s nose, I don’t want it rooting up my garden.

There was a time, a long-ago time,
when they gave you a voucher for a litre of oil,
in exchange for six kilos of beechnuts.

Diligence can do it,
they said.
All it takes is three days of back breaking work in the forest.
If you have little ones,
and maybe sing a happy song,
collecting six kilos of beechnuts
is child’s play.

Collect more and keep them to enhance your diet.
You want bread?
Cracked and ground into flour,
beechnuts are very tasty, make excellent bread.
But remember,
oxalic acid is harmful,
so roast these pretty little delicacies first
to avoid bad pain in the gut.
And warn the little ones.

A pig, on the other hand,
enjoys a forest meal, no ill-effects at all.
No need for roasting.
Yet.

I’ll Take April

When pressed,
I’ll take April.
March being the boring end of winter
May all lilacs and romantic love.
Yes, I’ll take April,
perplexed, bewildered, vacillating April,
tempestuous one minute and
in deep thought about spring the next.
April,
the yellow month,
(did you know yellow is for happiness?)
the month when bumblebees bumble
drunk with unimaginable possibilities
and the thrush perched on the tallest conifer
shatters the early morning mist
with a call to arms.

Solitary Walker in the Mist

 

Above,

an upturned bowl of mist,

neither light nor shadow falling to break my solitude,

as I walk the lanes.

Grey shapes loom,

trees and hedgerows stand alone,

waiting, waiting,

 once more to see and know each other, when light returns.

Silently dripping into the earth,

all life suspended.

Nebulous ghosts swirl around me,

regrets, like wraiths, rise from the darkness

as cold tears embrace me.

Dense air, unheeding of the solitary walker, shivers ahead.

Feet stumble,

held captive momentarily by greedy sods,

clinging to the only life there is,

unwilling to let go.

The chariot of the Sun God

has abandoned the earth;

angry riders gallop across the sky,

speed and billowing menace their only purpose.

 My heart weeps too,

longing for joy and ease of living,

seeing

all hope buried in sodden graves.

o-o-o-o

And then,

hidden among the fallen leaves of yesteryear

pressed into the mud by unceasing rain,

shiny heads of new life emerge

into a brave new world.

Winter aconites beam a golden glow into the gloom,

  tiny chalices of light, encircled by a glossy crown,

they promise rebirth.

The Lighthouse

La Jument, off the coast of Brittany, 

photograph by Jean Guichard

Stiff-necked, and proud,
the indomitable tower rises from the sea,
defying gravity and all the powers of nature.

Man, who made earth herself his subject,
whose confidence and self-belief
allow him to stand idly by
while all the world around him is at war,
is no more than a step away
from utter devastation.

Reaching into the depths,
the Gods fling up a handful of their ire
and place it like a ruff around man’s throat.
destroying effortlessly all that he has built.



The photo above is taken just seconds before a giant wave engulfed  the lighthouse La Jument in Brittany. Theodore Malgorn, the lighthouse keeper, was waiting to be rescued. When he heard what he thought was the rescue helicopter, he rushed downstairs and stepped outside the door. It was a photographer come to take pictures of the storm. Malgorn made it back inside only by virtue of a very quick reaction.


This post is in response to Tess Kincaid’s Magpie Challenge No. 202. To find other contributors click on the link.

The Clock

image by crilleb50

Day in day out, wherever I go,
I carry my clock with me.
Seconds, minutes, hours of my life,
it tells them all,
it beats and strikes and sometimes chimes.

Made to the highest specification,
by a Master Clockmaker,
it pleases me but seldom.
Today, the pace is wrong,
too fast, too slow.
Relentlessly, the clock ticks on.
its tempo never varies.

Today I plead with it to take its time,
to stay the hour of departure,
to keep my loved one by my side,
for happiness to last a minute longer.

When pain and sadness visit, it beats too slow for me.
I want the time to fly, the misery to end,
the hands to move around the face at twice the speed of light.

The clock was with me when my father died and
mother left her place beside the hearth.
Each step I took away from home into the world beyond,
was marked in stately progress by my clock.
When love was new, when marriage joined two hearts for life,
When children came and went,
when hair turned grey and backs grew bent,
when summer turned to autumn,
my clock was by my side.

Just now and then, it stutters, falters,
its rhythmic beat disturbed by unknown hands.
The Master Clockmaker probes its workings,
a little oil, a touch, a a tightening of the springs,
and off it goes, the mechanism wound once more.

One day my clock will stop,
and when it stops, it stops for good,
no power on this earth can make it beat again.
I know I’ve used it well and when I hand it back,
I’ll say,

‘Returned in gratitude;
I took great care of it,
but now it's time to rest the hands.
It wasn’t me who broke it.
The clock has stopped, all by itself.'




The Mag No. 189
Tess Kincaid’s Prompt for Sunday, Oct 6th, 2013
For many other treatments of the image click on the link.

Connections

Map of St. Ninian’s Isle, Shetland, Scotland

For A.H.

The two of us

Tethered

For all eternity.

Ravages of time,

tempests and turmoil

cannot separate us.

Spring-tides and storms

may force the link

to become submerged,

but soon calm prevails

and it is free again

for all to see.

Like the 

umbilical cord

connecting us,

no matter how great

the strain

we put upon it.

This poem is in answer to
Tess Kincaid’s Magpie 186.
For more contributions click
on the link.

This Is Good

After weeks of ignoring the accumulated papers on your desk
you force yourself to sit down and deal with them,
and you find that most of them have sorted themselves out
and can be discarded.

A regular and long-standing meeting is due.
You have long lost any interest in the group and dread having to go out on a very hot day,
when you’d much rather stay in the shade of your own cool garden.
An email arrives saying that the meeting has been cancelled.

You have hit a dead end in your thinking,
all inventiveness has vanished like snow in summer.
Your head feels empty of ideas.
A glimmer of hope,
words come again.

A thunderstorm clears the air.
You rush outside and let rain wash all oppression away.

You finally decide to postpone reading a worthy book which came
highly recommended.
Instead you pick up the latest novel by a much loved author,
less well thought of.
You lie back and read into the small hours, loving every minute.

An acquaintance has a present for you.
Your heart sinks,
experience tells you it will be a gift for which you have
neither use nor liking,
but you must show gratitude;
they mean well.
They hand it to you and you were wrong.
They found the book, the token, the flowers
you didn’t know you wanted.

But best of all is
to have a friend who will come to your aid
when you are troubled and ill.
When the news is bad,
when clouds obscure your vision,
and you don’t know where to turn for the best.

Best of all is a friend
who will lift the burden with a light touch,
whose kindness comes
straight from the heart.

Slaughter At Valley’s End - Dove Slain

A thud
A crash
A scream.

Rushing to the back door,

The evidence left behind

a look confirms what we feared
has happened.

But wait.
A bird has crashed into the window,
that is so,
but who stands proud on the fallen dove?

Sparrowhawk,
merciless killing machine
chased her hapless prey into a blind alley,
triumphant
in the blink of an eye.

Victor and victim,
hunter and quarry,
part of the cycle of life.


Birds form almost the entire diet of the sparrowhawk; they take any bird from the smallest tit to a full grown grouse. Game birds, particularly smaller, immature birds, as well as lapwing, wood pigeons, collared doves - as in this case - and jay, are well within the female bird’s capabilities. The adult male is smaller, he seldom weighs more than150 gm (5 ounces). Even he will sometimes kill birds as large as himself.  Sparrowhawks are classic opportunists; a bird table in the garden is an open invitation to them, which means that gardens have become their favourite killing fields.

15 minutes later in a flowerbed.
Conclusive evidence. The hawk took off with the
plucked remains.

Gardener is a pigeon fancier; for years he kept pigeons in his backyard; some of his birds were valuable, successful racers; sparrowhawks took more than one of them. Gardener tells a story of him lying in wait in the open window, shotgun trained on the bird table, which the hawk visited at roughly the same time in late afternoon each day. As if the raptor knew the fate which awaited him, he stayed away on that day. And the next. And the next again. Gardener almost gave up. He was going to give it one more day and, sure enough, the hawk appeared suddenly, at great speed, out of a thorn hedge, making for a bird on the table. Gardener blasted him.

I hate this story and killing raptors is now prohibited. But when you see a sparrowhawk stooped over a fresh-plucked songbird, with wings cowling the victim like a vampire’s cape, I defy any one not to be distressed. I have song thrushes nesting in the hedge.This bird is becoming rarer every year. At 5.30 every morning, the male pours his loud, bell-like clarion wake-up call across the garden from the top of the tall conifer; should I not hear this sound one morning before the end of the natural season and  the hawk have killed my thrushes, I’d wish for a shotgun myself. I know that sparrowhawks have every right to survive too but, please, leave my songbirds lone. Take a rook or jackdaw, maybe another collared dove or two, even a pigeon or gamebird. It’s the second time that I’ve seen the hawk linger by the bird table and I’ve seen him pick off a feeding sparrow and bluetit , which gave me an unhappy jolt both times.  Perhaps I’d better move the feeding station or stop feeding altogether.

Hawks are not afraid of people, so standing guard won’t help.

Thank you very much, Hilary, much appreciated.

Then And Now

Hurrah!

Hilary at The Smitten Image

has included this post

in her

Age And Infancy

Charles Edward Marshall 1872-1922

Do you remember how big our world was, when we were little,

how important ? And we too were important.

Fearlessly parting meadows of tall grass, we swam into the unknown,
daisy chains, bees and butterflies, and creepy-crawlies of wondrous hue our reward.

How big our house was, a castle, for playing hide and seek,
stairs to mount and "look, I can fly", when coming back to earth again.
And grandad by the fire, in the deep, wide chair, a fortress too high to climb,

open arms lifting us to a safe haven in a breathless storm.

Remember our street, alive with the sound of  adventure;

jumping gutters as deep as any brook, we crossed untamed deserts to reach the oasis of
broken pavements where our friends played on the other side of the road. 

Scooters, tri-cyles, bi-cycles, legs pumping, we raced the wind.

How high the trees were, how loud the thunder,

the snow deep as the deepest feather bed,

how bright the sun, and how dark the clouds.
Days as long as years and years unimaginable.

And how clever they were, our minders and teachers,

how great their knowledge and wisdom.

They knew the way to the secrets of all the ages,

and they knew how to mend broken shins.

But all things must change.

We grew a little, in years and in inches,

mountains became hills and chairs mere seats.

Thunder and darkness now hold no fears,
grass must be mowed and daisies are weeds. 

We regret the smallness of houses,
sedately descend each flight of stairs.
Minders and teachers ourselves,
still hoping for knowledge and wisdom,
still lacking the art to mend broken hearts.