Slowing down Spring

A path dividing a wheat and a oilseed rape field filled with flowers and insects under a rain-heavy sky.

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            Slowing Down Spring

Leaden heavy clouds lay upon the land,

Slowing its spin, it seems, the wind

Whistling chill, winds back spring:

So all pauses, apparently, and allows us,

Perhaps, appreciate all a little longer:

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Continued calling of song thrushes,

Tree-creepers, warblers and woodpeckers;

The candle cones perched upon pines;

Chandeliers of chestnut blooms

Letting petals swirl to gather in drifts

And dropping fruits of tiny infant seeds;

New green sprigs on twigs of spruce trees;

Dandelions, the sign of spring, still

The dominant design of spring,

Drawing swarms of insects, revived

As running rivers; glowing gloss and

Ripples of graining barley, regaining

The aspect of May in Spain; golden

Sunspots, when rays sneak out of clouds,

That simply seep into souls like

Helium to help them soar…

Making every day a delayed delight

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We might not see for many more:

As spring shortens ever more and

Assimilates to frightful summer 

Sooner than we’re prepared for.

Rainbow marks the return of the sun, to fields not fully seeded from the earlier drought. We got a storm that dropped a lot of water this weekend which hopefully has saved the harvestt.

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We had a few weeks with cooler temperatures, which was a big relief, even in Navarra. Not so much rain in many places, but it gave us time to really see the green before it turns to gold. Which it was threatening to too soon this hear – to dusty tan and brown, too. And it seems spring will shorten as we go forward into climate chaos.

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Of course, in our village the verges went brown after the council yet again sprayed it with glyphosphate… And one local farmer did the same to his field verges, which just ruins my day as I cycle up the hill…

It’s just ugly, apart from idiotic etc… But it runs a brown line all the way up… in an area which has a natural park and is advertised to tourists to go hiking and mushroom picking in the forests above these fields…

Missing things before they’re gone

            The Lilacs Have Already Faded

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We wait as children for Christmas, 

The bursting forth of buds, spread of

Poppies along bearding barley fields;

Delighting in drifting aspen down.

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But if we perchance glance away 

During spring’s apotheosis we find

The lilacs have already faded, and

Summer swiftly advances unto autumn.

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Just as a blink allows the bastards

Take flame and machine to the trees,

Scraping drains in absence of rain,

Leaving shoots shorn dead as winter.

I wrote this last week when I was in my garden, seeing that the patch I didn’t mow the week before now sported a lovely little orchid.

But the lilac I had planted just beyond had lost its one flowerhead, having faded to brown already in the space from one weekend to the next.

And I thought of how quickly the spring passes, as usually, even when we vow not to miss it. It’s too short, even when its only summer on its way, we all know where summer leads….

Then I saw while on a cycle what the local roads authority had done, in May, to the hedges and scrub alongside the roads around the village – gone along with who knows what machinery and razed everything down to the ground. Of course, if they discovered plastic rubbish under that bush, they left that there.

The brown should be brambles and other scrub. Even the poplars got shorn, as if we’re expecting double-decker buses to come along this road…

What kind of mindset allows this to happen? Where are the leaders?

Any pretence that this was done to aid vehicle passage is demonstrably false given the destruction of vegetation many metres on the far side of the safety barrier on the road.

The locals just shrugged it off. It seems they think all this can be infinitely replaced, not that it’s a last bastion of such beauty.

The trees upon the slope on the left help slow down erosion. There used to be more underneath them.

Is it not possible to see that we are losing things before they’re lost, or are we doomed to miss only what we have completely exterminated?

if you can see the black plastic, then whoever cut this down to the stumps should have seen it too, and should have done the right thing.

The village in the north of Spain is not the only place where such destruction takes place, of course. Just last week a huge swath of Killarney National Park was burned by negligence or intentional malice.

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On the other hand, I just finished reading Anne Frank’s diary for the second time, after about a 35 year gap… and I was struck by her passages about Nature.

Just like many during the lockdowns we went through, Anne realised that joy and peace can come from looking at the sky and the trees. Of course, even at thirteen and fourteen, Anne Frank was a very self-aware person compared to most around her, even then, never mind now.

I took snaps of the paragraphs. She wonders if her confinement indoors so long has made her so “mad about Nature” which is probably true to some extent, just as it was for many others. But she sees it as a medicine, “which can be shared by rich and poor alike,” and “the one thing for which there is no substitute.”

I’ve never tried valerian or bromide, but next time you feel shit, try looking at the sky. I recommend it, too.

This was a book I recommended to my students as soon as went into lockdown last year. Things changed for them, but how much did they change? I wonder.

Let that last like of the upper paragraph sink in. This was said 60 years ago, before the shit started to hit the fan ecologically. Have we absorbed that information yet?

My question is whether that last line has sunk into our collective consciousness, or it is just that we can’t fathom our existence without Nature – even it if is out there, waiting for when we want it, after we’re released from prison, or our confinement, or we fancy a walk away from our computers? Until it isn’t.

And can we act as if something is lost before it actually is, giving us the chance to save it at the last minute.

Because we’re down to the last minute.

Theresa May, please pay attention!

What I can’t understand about politicians is how little they have studied history, and how little weight they seem to give to it.

But there is only history.

None of these people can really be in it for the money.

At least not the wages.

Perhaps they are waiting for the revolving door to give them a cushy number, but you’d never know that when you see how hard they try to hang on to their current positions.

And that’s what’s confusing. Why are they so god damn eager to stay in power over their duty to do what they were voted to do – improve the country?

It’s not as if they’ll be on the dole forever after if they do get voted out next time around.

And it’s not as if they’ve not got a nice pension for the rest of their life off the back of those four years

If they’d studied their history, they’d know, they’d understand, they’d see very very clearly that there is only history.

Nothing else counts.

Staying in power is not important. How long was Churchill in power? The first time was shorter than David Cameron’s stint. Contrast that with Margaret Thatcher’s long reign. What do you think of when you hear her name? That she fucked over the country and it’s poorest citizens. Not that she was in Downing Street for longer than either man.

Yet Theresa May seems to be concentrating on staying in power as long as the other woman, and not accepting the fact that she is there to do one job, and then go if the going is good – to get her people through this next two years as best she can.

A newspaper article I read yesterday says she’s worried about parties on her right flank and their media supporters.

Fuck the right flank. History is not written by the Daily Mail.

You’ll be out of power soon enough no matter what, Theresa. Concentrate on the task at hand and ignore everyone on either side. Do what you have to do right while you’re doing it.

You’ll still be rich enough outside number 10, and whoever takes over will at least, hopefully, have a country worth leading when you’re done.

If the wise among us tell normal Joe Bloggs like ourselves to live our lives thinking of what others will say about us after we’re gone, how much more important should that advice be for our glorious leaders? After all, when I pop my clogs, a few folk might say they’re happy I’m dead, and though I hope more will lament my passing, I don’t expect the streets to be awash with tears. After all, most people will probably have no idea who the hell I am, or was.

But many politicians seem to have no clue, or care, about what we’ll say about them when they’re gone. And we’re all going to talk about them – mostly badly in many cases. Is that worth a few extra years in power? Who thinks about opening up trade with China, ending the Vietnam War, or even the amazing Clean Air Act when they hear the name Richard Nixon? Nobody. Everyone thinks, “he was a c**t.”

End of lesson, Theresa. Thanks for paying attention.