Accipiter nisus

 Poetry has been somewhat absent from the blog recently, so let's rectify that. The spark for this is a sparrowhawk who decided yesterday that my garden was the ideal place to eat his prey, a chaffinch I think. It's the circle of life.

It's a bit blurry, not to mention showing that the wargaming annexe could do with a coat of paint.

This is what Ted Hughes had to say about the visitor:

Slips from the eye-corner - overtaking
Your first thought.

Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth
The sun’s cooled carbon wing
Whets the eyebeam.

Those eyes in their helmet
Still wired direct
To the nuclear core - they alone

Laser the lark-shaped hole
In the lark’s song.

We find the earth-tied spurs, among soft ashes.
And maybe we find him

Materialised by twilight and dew,
Still as a listener -

The warrior

Blue shoulder-cloak wrapped about him,
Leaning, hunched,
Among the oaks of the harp.

Six then seven

 "And the seventh sorrow is the slow good-bye..." - Ted Hughes

Turn 6 ended before it started, with a tied dice roll. It cost the garrison one food supply, although I don't think that will come into play; feel free to throw that back in my face at some later stage. On the plus side, I found the missing card at that point. Overall turn 7 hasn't gone well for the besiegers, against whom the tide would appear to have turned.

While they were occupied repairing the sections of sap flooded by the torrential rain during Turn 5, they were driven off completely from the third parallel. Sensing an opportunity the garrison started to dig out from the covered way, aiming to seize and destroy the gun emplacements.

Before they could do so the besiegers managed to move up a couple of siege guns, surviving the opportunity fire as they did so, and, for the first time, bombarded the wall. It is, I suspect, too little too late.

The die next to the wall shows the cumulative hits against that section. When it reaches ten the section will drop from level six to level five. As you might guess it needs to reach level zero before there is a breach. It's not going to happen. The other die is showing the cumulative hits from the mortars which have been shelling the town. Once again, this isn't going to amount to anything worth talking about very soon.

Ignore what it says - it's really Turn 7

And this is why: the attackers have very little morale left. To add insult to injury one of their commanders has died of disease, meaning that they weren't able to rally any units this turn.

I've mentioned before that I'm not confident about my grasp of either rules or tactics - and that definitely still stands - but I have had a bit of an epiphany regarding the role of infantry in the game, which is progress of a sort.

Lovesong

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His word were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

                                       - Ted Hughes