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.

sf

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.

Crazy Weather… just who’s the crazy one around here?

They say you never know yourself if you’re going crazy… perhaps it seems those around you are tho ones who are really crazy.

We call this weather crazy, but aren’t we really the crazy ones for not recognising it for what it is, and indeed really basically fucking batshit crazy for letting it happen without doing anything useful to stop or slow it, and in fact being the cause of it all…. and all the time knowing that it’s going to come back and not just bite us on the arse, but beat the shit out of us, till any sense we have left will be knocked out of us.

Flowers share the branch with not-yet-fallen leaves on a tree in November in a Pamplona park….

            The Reaping of Disdain 

Pink blossoms add extra beauty

To an autumnal almond tree:

Orange and auburn leaves left

Before falling with the frost

At least formally expected 

If it arrives as it did normally in

November. 

Sun and clear sky

Seem apt background to marvel

At young walnuts dotted on a

Bare-leaved tree, wondering if we

Will get a second harvest this year.

Like the oilmen grinning as the

Ice melts for their machines to

Begin drilling without awaiting 

Spring, 

  

We reap the short-term 

Gains until the true harvest of

Our disdain, ignorance, apathy

Ripens in silent screaming of 

Ecosystems stretched to snapping.

The walnuts. They were still growing last week, even after a snow squall in between…

Suddenly Spring

Suddenly Spring

 

How quickly it comes, now, this thing called spring:

Crocuses suddenly splatter bank in violet and blue

Blackbirds burst out with twilight tunes as

Bats trawl back and forth for rising flies proving

This apparent death of winter weather is true.

 

Considering I was sledding in a village near where this photo was taken yesterday on this very day last year, I only hope a blast of snow doesn’t kill the flowers unfolding, nor catch the bats too early out of hibernation.

 

 

 

The end of the summer

So August wasn’t so treacherous this year. I got the final edits and cover art for my second novel, Five Days on Ballyboy Beach ready for its release on the 19th, I did some more rewriting of a novella and had it accepted for publication in the new year with Tirgearr Publishing, and I wrote a short story based on my safari in South Africa last year, called At Last Light on the Sage Flats, which will be the title story to a collection of short stories I’m putting together for the end of this year. Oh, I finished that first draft of The Ecology of Lonesomeness, too.

I also started the sequel to Leaving the Pack – not quite sure of the title yet, but the working title is Leading the Pack.

And I am three-quarters way through reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which I have had on my shelf for about twelve years! I didn’t get around to season five of Breaking Bad yet, though – but the autumn is coming (feels like it even here, too – we didn’t have what you’d call a Spanish summer this year), so I’ll get to that, when I have a second draft done of Lonesomeness….

 

Meanwhile, here is one of the few poems I had a chance to finish, about doing very little….

 

 

 

Getting Old, Slowly

 

Along the ridge a row of windmills go slowly round.

You can hear them when the wind turns south.

Twenty-five years they’ve ringed the valley

And show no sign they’re soon to fall.

Similarly, we inhabitants stand around,

Eating from our gardens here, seasonally

Watching flight of swallows and their fellows,

Observing numbers (often) ebb and (seldom) flow,

Grass get cut instead of grazed and oak trees grow tall,

New abodes are built and others crumble to the ground,

Sitting upon a porch of an evening, the sky yet

As wonderful as youth, and starry as can still get,

Achieving only that act of getting old slowly.

Spring poem, more distraction.

 

Aspen Drift

 

The downy seeds of aspen drift,

Dancing across the evening sun on

The wind from silvery shivering-leaved poplars,

Threaten to clog my mind full

From now till summer’s final winds

Sweep them out:

Stuck in the simple act of observation

Until autumn.

Poem for Spring – my most distracted season

            Listening to Spring

Dandelions in little city lawns,

Until the mower docks them

Days before they can scatter parachutes,

Lend life to tidy tulips in brown soil

Of council border floral designs,

Screaming the spring in spattered gold

As loudly as frog-full vernal pools,

As eloquently as the yellow-eyed

Blackbird that would defy the traffic

As if in silent rural evening.

Leaves flash delicate green on trees,

Catching each twig like licking fire,

Requiring only light and sky for life,

Sun settles on skin like a mother’s touch,

Leaving one watching, lingering,

Wishing this was all life relied on,

As if the roads meant little to us either;

Bringing back a faith in the seasons,

In the circle, once again,

Making us believe in the idea of eternity.