Hot and the trees rustle
leaves crackle like shiny paper
in the breeze.
Distant voices
children playing
crackle the taut air waves
twang the chords of summer
unsilent fledgelings.
Tag: summer
A moment of summer
That moment of utter calm,
golden as buttercup mornings
and pollen-dropping dusk,
when summer settles,
a hand, a face in the blue,
and each tiny insect sound
in the brittle-stalked hay, new-mown,
the tireless chiff chaff of the chiff chaff,
sudden flash of swallows,
is a stroke of genius,
a chord that balances light, life and peace
in the slow opening and closing
of a butterfly’s wings.
Kite
Summer spreads
like butter on bread
yellow and thick
and already we slow our steps
to match the swaying
tall-tree shadows
the casually flapping wings
of a passing kite.
I sit in shadows
I got this sonnet style poem from the Oracle this morning.
I sit in shadows cast by half-seen dreams
That drip their honeyed light on thirsty ground.
Though storms play, twisting skeins of feathered cloud
And threading them with rain, I close my eyes,
See only summer ocean, swallow-tossed,
with waves of darting blue and lightning forked.
There are roses still that climb the house about,
And songs still sung from tree to sighing tree
In the ancient shining tongues that only
Birds know, sweet and sad, rose-red and raw
With premonitions of the whispered cold,
The bare bones shifting of a year grown old.
It will come the end, hill-stalking black and stark,
Yet in the deepening sky soars spring, the lark.
The summers I remember
For the dverse prompt. Hoping this new editor is going to behave itself. And will it keep the formatting? I should make a book… Fifth try. Sixth.
I remember when we could enjoy the heat
and savoured cool beneath the trees,
the running stream.
I remember when the blackbird sang
all summer long a summer song,
and we lazed, pink-skinned
beneath the hedge where berries hung,
~but that was before~
the rains came rare and late
or early and too hard too much,
and now the trees hang dying heads,
and rattle dry-leafed branches
where no bird sings, throats too parched,
no strength to waste in beauty,
and we wonder what the spring will bring.
Gogyohka for summer morning
sun ripples
through flesh and bone
chasing memories of cold and damp
and the darkness
of a night of no moon
cool grass glistens
dew-full
and a chiff chaff
chiff-chaffs quietly
in the sleepy morning hedge
here
where the boundaries are green and leafy
and the stream runs lower as heat rises
we stand on the edge
of vertiginous summer
Hay raking
Haymaking was put off for three weeks which is what I wanted, to let all the wildflowers finish and set seed first. The hay is now all raked into an interesting geometrical pattern like a Neolithic temple site, waiting for the baler to come.
This is the west meadow looking south
East meadow looking west. The red and white tape is to cordon off an area where saplings are planted.
The south section looking up towards the house.
The part I like best, the bottoms where the willows are, a section about 20 metres by 200 metres that isn’t mown and is just left to its own devices.
Fierce summer
I wrote this gogyohka this morning and discovered that Paul Miltaru had posted a photograph to accompany it. Thank you, Paul for letting me borrow it.
the wind blows hot and fierce
bringing only dry-leaf rain
to this parched land
fissures gape—listen
you can hear the earth gasp
Half-hidden
Summer
meadow among
long grasses sweet bedstraw
a slight depression barely hid—
hare’s nest.
Heat rises
Heat rises from baked earth,
sighs in whisper of thistledown and butterfly wings,
bathes in gold the green beneath
more and more relentless blue,
seeps in the sweet, ripe smell of bird-pecked figs.
Leaves flutter,
flickering the shadowed sunlight where
a blackbird sings softly, a trio of notes,
listening in vain
for stream babble
to finish the line.
