September

• 

Track rises
between small fields where grass grows
splashed with colour

• 

Hot and dull the fields, full of origano and dense with trees in the folds where streams run. A patchwork of cultivation and places never worked at all. Birds pipe and the silvery sound of running water, deep and green despite the drought. There was a storm in the night, brief and noisy, half-filled the water butts and freshened up the frogs

• 

greenfinch pipes
a complaint for the lost year
the empty nest

• 

a lament for the cooling nights, the days shortening, this year’s young raised, and who knows if there will be a next year?
At the end of this lane there are only a cart tracks crossing country, meandering along the edges of fields, following the contours of the hills. Winding and empty, and I wonder how long it can last.

• 

Vent d’autan
in the maïs—parchment
rattling wordless songs.

• 

Unexpected summer

We had no internet for a couple of days, got a lot of revision done. It’s just back and so is summer. 24°C yesterday 34°C today.

• 

I have missed the damselflies, their gem-stone glow among the tree shadows along the stream, the sapphire and emerald, turquoise and garnet against the slow dark water. When the sky has been a stormy sea and the meadows an ocean of waving waterweed, I have missed the light.

Now the sun clouds have broken, tame as sheep and horses, and nothing trammels the summer sun, insect-light fill the shade. And in the sun among mauve banks of mint and pennyroyal, teasel and thistle, the flutter of butterfly wings, every shade of russet orange splashed with white and streaked with black, is so dense, their silence seems impossible.

The air moves and the poplars sigh like the sea, foaming on the strand, breathing butterfly and dragonfly so loud I can scarce hear the gentle piping of the birds. Later weighed down by the growing heat, the breeze dies and even the poplars fall silent.

From cold clear night of crystal stars, the day rises to a crescendo of heat, and the meadow combusts in butterfly wings.

By the house, flowers hang limp. A dragonfly zips and whirrs like a clockwork toy.

this world rolls skyward
evening clouds dove-grey— a
new moon sets in gold

Smoke

For the dverse prompt, including the lines from The Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats:

‘I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head.‘

I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head, but the fire, I took with me, and the rushing stream couldn’t quench the flames. I listened to the blackbird, but his song was out of kilter, and the sun streamed slantwise through the pale green leaves.

They say the world is spinning to its end, the heaving oceans empty of their fish are filling with our discarded plastic. I listen to the blackbird but his song is not for me.

They’re shooting in the chase, I can hear the horns and the coarse voices shouting, coarser than any dog giving tongue. As if we needed more blood. The world is drowning in it.

Listen, blackbird, to the pale-winged moths, their song is more in keeping with these end times. Hush. I hear the ocean rushing over the world’s edge.

Best wishes

Tis the season, so here’s a festive decoration from outside the barn door

and one from inside the barn door in the kitchen

 

House hunkers down. The folk that pad and trot around its walls the night have gone. Only the birds, ever-hungry, ever-cheerful chatter, fluttering from tree to tree and into the porch after seed and other necessities. A deer family ambles through the willows by the stream. Dawn sun streams gold, a glimpse of heaven before its flow slows and ceases. Cloud thickens.

days slip deeper
into the heart of the cold
east wind sighs winter

Three Line Tales: Making choices

For Sonya’s Three Line Tales Prompt. Don’t ask what it means. It’s just one of those days.
photo by Ashley Byrd via Unsplash

Paint the things that aren’t there; fill in all the unseen spaces, leaving blank walls pristine.

Shuffle the anxious worms that suck and strip the joy from life into the slippery tubes,

stopper them up, close your eyes and breathe only the white purity of thoughtlessness.

Three Line Tales: Anonymous

For Sonya’s prompt.

photo by Sunyu via Unsplash

 

I can’t write your story, but it’s written in your eyes, the days of tracking, the fear, the fatigue and in the end, the men with spades.

They dig until they reach the heart and drag it out, still beating.

I have seen them, the cubs still blind, tossed in the waste from the cowshed, and whenever in the cool spring night, I hear a vixen call, I think of them, and all the others.

#writephoto: Millrace

For Sue Vincent’s Thursday challenge, a sort of prose poem with WIP in mind.

The millrace runs but there is no more a mill, and trees grow now where wagons once stood with their head-hanging horses, waiting to be loaded with their bolts of finished worsted.

The beck still babbles, its leaping waters clearer than they ever were in those days when wild nature served one purpose—to be harnessed to the fiery chariots of the fiercest of men.

Fierce and proud, with a blindness when it came to the suffering they caused, with their grasping greed for profit, were the men in paunch-vast waistcoats.

If they didn’t see the misery in the humanity around them, how could they have noticed when the mill streams fouled were running black or blue or cimson with dyes from the washings of the vats?

But their ferocity was puny in the face of wakened nature, when the stones had had enough of blood and desecration, and the sacrifice of beauty on the altar of greed.

The mill race runs forever, leaping crystal clear, sunlight glinting on the ripples and cascading woven water.

Where is your monument in stone, in black Millstone Grit, your dark, satanic symbol of industrial success?

We know where you are now, Mr Mill Owner the Mighty, you are in the deep dark hole where the dead men go.

#writephoto: Listening to the ripples

For Sue Vincent’s Thursday photo prompt.

 

Still water holds memories, of love and loss, death and growing, peace and tumult. A cloud mirror sometimes, speckled with bird wings, and sometimes a raging, silent fire with the trampling boots of soldiers, flame-haired and steel-coated. Sometimes.

I can sit on the bank of any lake, toss a pebble and watch the ripples, knowing that in the tiny bore radiating out from a central force is a story in momentous movement.

Sedge fringes stories and water birds illuminate the margins. Listen and you can hear the voices of the past, the crying in pain and anger, laughter in the sunshine, weeping beneath the rain.

Wind bends the dry stalks, ruffling and rippling, but when the wind holds its breath, when I listen, watch, deeper than the drifting clouds, I see the faces with eyes the same as mine or yours.

Words, though the tongue is not one I know, roll into the ear and the story they tell is universal, never dies, a longing to be loved, to find peace, to find peace.

Lost moments

Two pieces for dverse this evening. The first is flash fiction, the second a prose poem, both are less than 144 words. The first responds to the prompt, including the line from Louis MacNeice:

There are moments caught between heartbeats.

The prose poem doesn’t, because it isn’t flash fiction and because I split up the quote.

 

For some people there are lifetimes of glitter and happiness, and for others there are moments. Caught between heartbeats were our moments, a brief time of happiness when the world stretched ahead into more futures than we knew what to do with.

I knew all about you, your name, the colour of your hair, how you would be wild and artistic and sing like a lark. It was for you that we took the apartment near the school with an extra room and bought a pile of useless things for you because that’s what people do.

Then suddenly, between one check up and the next, you had stopped being, the chain of heartbeats that linked you to me to life, a dazzling future had broken and the round pearls had rolled away into the dark place where heartaches gather.

*

There are times when there is no time to count the passing of seconds, when the world fizzes like fireworks with whirlwinds of wild happiness, the births and marriages, the fallings in love and the tumultuous giving and receiving of love, when the moments pass so fast there is nothing between them.

And there are moments that drop one by one, echoing loud as raindrops in a bucket, that we try to catch and hold, to pile them like stones, a dyke against the pounding of oceans and the suction of the ebb tide, the moments of single breaths caught between heartbeats until the last heartbeat misses, and the breath escapes on a fading sigh.

 

Bird control

Photo ©Sébastien Bertru

 

A hen harrier circles the ploughed field, circles and

circles then swoops, and a flock of pigeons rises in a

 

compact, silvery glittering flutter, wheeling circling,

compact and glittering. Pigeon panic circles and flutters

 

away from the field drawn back again by the knowledge

of food, circling, in silver flutters beneath the golden sun.

 

The harrier, having missed the kill waits circling and

circling, drawing a crow family, sensing a fight, settling

 

in noisy mob pose in the trees. Pigeons panic a silver

cloud over the poplars, wheeling away and back while

 

crows wait and harrier watches. Over the ploughed

field the silver circling cloud flutters, sinks and settles

 

and the harrier is there, a pale, ghost-winged presence.

Crow mob clatters into flight, their ragged wings

 

clutching the air like hands clawing as they pivot on

nothing, yelling and snapping six black-cloaked

 

mobsters rattling beak blows and claws, circling,

wheeling, rising up beneath dropping from above,

 

fearless and aggressive. The hen harrier harried

mercilessly spreads pale wings, black-tipped and floats

 

away, leaving the silver cloud scattered among the furrows

and the black-cloaked vigilantes masters of the winter air.