Spring flowers

It’s spring flower time. Photos taken over the last fortnight.

The blackthorn was the first to blossom.

The daffodils have been in flower for a couple of weeks now.

and the celandine

This monumental stack of blue flower isn’t ceanothus but rosemary.

The shade beneath the hedges is full of violets

and the meadow is an ocean of deep blue muscari

Black violets

A sequence of short poems on a dark theme.

Photo ©Rennett Stowe

 

 

Black violets clutched in your fist,

Cloying perfume from beyond the dark,

No light in your eyes,

No words on your tongue,

To answer a silent plea,

Hope that claws from a hollow heart,

Take me back to your shadows.

 

Lunar landscape of my heart,

Crawls with black holes of despair,

Where even screams are silent,

Smothered in fog and filthy air.

 

The silence between us is heavy as lead,

Black as pitch,

And cold as an arctic wind,

Yet I remember,

How once it was red with passion,

Fierce as a vengeful robin,

And light as a summer breeze.

 

Water pocked

with raindrops pitted

quicksilver flowing

and filling so fast

I lose track of the reason

you left me here

with empty hands

in the falling rain.

The lull before the summer

Summer is in the air. Not so much in the temperature, as it is still quite brisk in the early morning, but as the sun rises, the air warms and the earth begins to smell of summer.

In town, summer smells are not always the most enticing. Pools of human dejections of one kind or another are part of the scenery, and not every citizen has learned what rubbish bins are for. But away from the streets, the smell of damp earth getting hot predominates, mown grass and the scent of spring flowers.

Viola odorata by Fritz Geller-Grimm

The sounds I associate with spring, the song of the robin and the wagtail, have given way to the screeching of the swifts that finally arrived last week.

Chimney swift overhead by Jim McCulloch

Trixie caught her second lizard of the season—must have been a pretty geriatric specimen since she isn’t the most agile of felines—which we were able to rescue before she damaged it too much.

Common lizard on boardwalk by Babelstone

This season is too short for me. Plants flower and fade too early and the season of baking heat is too long. I intend to profit from these next weeks of green growth, because by June the garden will look like a jungle.