Blog Archives
It’s for the Kids!
Saving the Next Generation
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Wherein comes the urge to chastise
Children chasing chaffinches, ducks;
Picking wildflowers for bunches just
To steep in water and later pour it out?
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These innocent actions seem almost
Painful for some of us to see, since
It seems every seedling, even insect, is
Particularly precious in this sinking era.
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Now we need to encourage kids to
Lie down on a lawn, plucking daisies
As they please, ripping leaves and
Flicking petals to the breeze, immersed
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In the verdure that surrounds us. Thus
They will in turn appreciate the wonder
Of these tiny treasures of orchids, clover,
Cornflowers as especially as do we mourners.
I’ve been offline to a certain extent so far this summer. But I’ve been outside a lot, enjoying the nature left to us, as you can see from these photos ( I don’t publish anyone’s face in this blog), and with my kids in Ireland.
But I have republished Peter and the Little People, and it’s out in paperback!
It’s for the Kids!
Of course, anyone of any age can enjoy it, so go ahead and pick up a copy. It’s perfect for reading aloud, too.
Like everything we do, it’s for the kids who will have to visit places much changed and degraded unless we stop what we’re doing.
I don’t let my kids pick some wildflowers, like orchids, but then the local roads authority or the farmers come along and strim or spray the ditches and hedgerows…
The news this summer is of course pretty depressing, with the IPCC pretty much saying we’re in big trouble unless our so-called leaders act like we need them to…
So have a read of Peter and the Little People, and then help your children write some letters to the Taoiseacht or whoever supposedly leads your government telling them they’ll have a place in history – good or bad is up to them.
Sun Set Sun Day
Happy Summer!
Though I’m Irish, and for me Summer started in May, making this MidSummer’s Day, logically, it seems that the astronomers around me disagree. Whatever.
Here’s a short poem I thought of a couple of Sundays ago, to make you think of the joy of these short nights.
Sunday Sunset
Other days we rush inside
From the porch, to prepare
Dinner, drinks and sit upon
Sofa to see a movie or TV; or
Drive to the city for dusk, but
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Sunday is when we want to stay
Watching sunset and slipping
Off to bed when the bats and
Owls calling have taken over
From twilight blackbirds and
Nightingales, the last rays of
Sun replaced by moonbeams,
The gleam of glow worms when
Cicadas are silent to let crickets
Sing, as peace settles like aspen
Cotton in the stillness between
Breezes. Then sleep suggests itself
Until we rise again to catch the dawn.
Late Rains
Late April Rains
The rain makes everything all right,
Like blessed water flowing over lips.
Birds sing sweeter as if assured
Life will hang on in for spring,
As insects emerge from dry refuge
To delight in the damp leaves.
Eardrums encounter drips gently
Caress the mind into peaceful ease:
Merged in memories of seasons spent
Naïve as nestlings of summers to come.
It’s a rainy day today, which reminded me of a poem I wrote a month or so ago, about how the rain is welcome when the land is parched. At least in imagination it staves off the drought to come and we live a little longer.
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.
What kind of mindset allows this to happen? Where are the leaders?
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.
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?
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.”
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.
Another Spring
I took a trip to the river some days ago and sat down and thought of how different this spring is – much drier or course, but simply because we can go outside and see it the way we weren’t able to last year.
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Another Spring
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The soil thirsts for showers, but still
Seeds sprout green and buds flower.
Warblers and mistle thrushes whistle
Busily from the bramble bushes.
Upon thermals, raptors stall, surveying
Below, from distant forests, cuckoos call.
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I sit upon a stone wall, watching
Wagtails bobbing below a waterfall,
Remembering, last year, the view
Of a robin, a tree, we then held dear,
And our feelings thence unfree
Behind our self-made fence
As we waited to leave impatiently,
Even as news came to grieve.
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A brace of ducks take flight as slowly
Afternoon descends to night,
Slapping away the tiny silence, sweetly;
The air is filled with blossom scent,
And as the ducks take wing, I swear,
I shall never miss another spring.
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the small picture view – how wonderful it is just to see this instead of concrete or our own bare walls inside. Long may we leave our houses and be greeted with life.
Horizon
Looking Back Beyond Our Own Horizon.
Archaeology appears a never-ending
Expanding occupation as we explore
Our earth and find more lost lines of
People from the past. Why were they
And their way of life so often severed
Thus that these must dig for hints of
Their hopes and aspirations, methods
Of machinery, imaginations, machinations,
Left shadowed in splinters and shards,
In discarded tools and dwellings abandoned?
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Is it so easy to snap these threads?
Or is it the exact opposite: only
Possible if families never leave, and
Children have time and inclination to
Listen to old folks round the night fire?
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The burial mounds and dolmens
Scattered across our island are
Not our own; the céide fields and
Golden torcs were of a different folk
Who we replaced: pushed out; or who
Simply upped one day and walked away.
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I have been fairly quiet these last few weeks. Hope all are well.
I am reading Barry Lopez’z book Horizon. It’s not an easy book to read, but an important one. It provides food for many thoughts and one of the was this, that we should know more about our ancestors than we do, and perhaps its because they are not our ancestors at all…
I have been writing a little – a few more poems to post soon – and working through some new chapters of my major work in progress, Palu and the Pyramid Builders.. which relies a little on Archaeology, and a lot on my imagination of what a certain ancient civilisation might have been like..
Landscape Poems
In the Mist
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Calling cranes cross overhead like ghosts in the gloom,
Bells echo down the hillsides from hidden forest horses
Like shots across the valley, voices and dog barks below
Reveal others on the path as invisible to us as we to them
Knowing surrounds only by memory and sounds in the
Silence, the mist expands our senses out like landscape,
Until the sun lifts the veil and sends down into our pocket
Of the earth, a gentle caress of golden warmth and sets
The sky blue brightness shining off mountain cloud
Shimmering across imagined land beneath silver shroud.
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The Same Scene a Thousand Times
A painter can select one scene,
One view, from a certain lookout,
Turn it into their subject: treat
It a thousand ways, in varying lights.
But can a poet? Write a thousand times
Of one mountain range and valley?
Of all the many shadows and scudding
Clouds along its sides, and all
Aspects of the mists across its sky.
A painter can settle in one spot,
A cottage on a cliff:
Paint through the window.
A poet may install himself
In the same place,
But can he use words more than once
To illustrate the landscape?
Or once used, need he seek new views
To inspire new vocabularies?
It seems the answer lies in the
Lines, led along by eyes, looking
In ever-finer focus always finds
The mind inspired to write.
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I have no photos of the scenes that inspired the first poem, but the second poem was inspired by sunset in the same spot I watch sunset most Sunday evenings, and each time it’s inspiring, but can I write of the same valley for the rest of my life? Possibly. It depends less on the inspiration and more on my ability I suppose!
February means it’s Spring in some places
They’re Only Daisies
Spring mildness brings blooming back
A splash of buttercups, daisies
And dandelions, and my
Heart soars to see these
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As if the summer burst forth
In fullness of fuchsia, orchids,
Roses and hydrangea,
Even though they’re only daisies.
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Perhaps such sights would send
Soul soaring to much higher delight,
But little low pleasures enchant me
Easily, and I find myself exultant
To discover thus elation on a daily basis.
Well, we’ve survived the first month of 2021, which clearly hasn’t turned out as groovy as we’d hoped, so far.
I am patiently waiting, like the rest of the world, on a vaccine to be offered to me. I hope to get one before summer and be able to travel home to see folks.
Besides that, my life is pretty normal, apart from wearing masks all day.
School is still in session presidentially in Spain, and we’ve had few problems since we’re masking and gelling all the time.
My son’s swimming lessons restarted! other after school activities are going on without problems, too.
The bars were open at 30% occupancy, but are now only open for outside seating, but we can have a pincho on a Saturday afternoon with the kids now that the snow has melted and milder weather has returned.
I know it’s not spring here in Spain till the second half of March, but there are flowers out there, and I always stick to my Irish seasons anyway. Except for August. That’s still summer!
And I am feeling hopeful we won’t be kept inside during spring the way we were last year. Just a walk outside the city walls is all I ask.
I’ve written a fair few poems since Christmas, and I am slowly working through my WIP, Palu and the Pyramid Builders – last third of the manuscript, with 200k written so far.
I’ll be looking for beta readers in a year or two!
Meanwhile, I hope to post more poems this spring, and if you’re looking for a quick read, my novels are all still available for the time being, including my newest novella, The Logical Solution.
Enjoy the Silence before the coming Squall
I wrote this a few weeks ago, when the weather was colder – now it looks like we’re far from having a white Christmas.
But we can still enjoy the simple things, even if it is only by ignoring the difficulties awaiting us in the new year and beyond.
Silence before the Squall
Snow falls past pine trunks
Like solidified silence: almost
An extension of dawn’s tranquillity
Before squalls scream across canopy
Sending flakes flurrying down
To pale box and holly’s leaves.
As hours slowly pass, and white quietly
Deepens, the wind weakens and settles
Like drifts. Then, as evening stretches,
A strip of cloud opens to allow sunlight
Illuminate the scene before twilight,
Suffusing with diffuse golden radiance
The shifting mists along the ridges, red
Shrouding windmills. Imbuing soft sunset
With orange fire across the ice instead
Of another storm sending us scarpering
Inside to hide, it seems such gentle
Splendour shows us the scenes
Awaiting us after all our playing, and
For all our attempting to prepare
For her vagaries, in the end, we will
Flit like flakes upon her wind, for
We are but Nature’s playthings.
Happy Christmas everyone!
For those looking for a quiet read, or a nice E-reader gift, check out my books….
Some of them are on sale with Smashwords from today!
Cathedral Leaves
Cathedral Leaves
November sunlight shines at right angle
To catch leaves like stained window panes
On cathedral trees, lining riverbank, flanking
Dancing stream gleaming like black marble.
Drakes draw diamond wakes through dark
Water, songbirds call sonorous cries flying
Through timber, sweet as a child’s choir.
Marvelling at this flowing manifestation of
Nature’s majesty, I stand in reverence:
An experience as solemn as sacraments,
Holy as the spirit infusing these trunks
And tender tendrils dangling delicate
Leaves twisting daintily in the breeze.
And I wonder why those who kneel for
An invisible being in the sky, don’t even stop
To breath in, appreciate this display of
Beauty splayed out before them, inhale
Divinity in every breath of autumn
Dampness, soaked up sounds like dewfall,
Absorbed through skin as golden photons;
On shoulders felt the gentle hand of eternity.
