quite large

Over the still sea
a sudden cluster of clouds
just the sighs of whales

 

(I was reading tweets from that fine organisation The Size Of Wales yesterday, and remembered this incident from the Arabian Sea. The sketches are from my journal.)

hot day haiku

shade, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

In the oak's shadow
the sheltering sheep tell the time
-too hot to go out

cherry blossom

Snow out of season
softer than the blackcap's song
drifting on the Downs

early one morning

Just before dawn there's a handover period between the night shift and the day shift. So you can hear both owls and robins. And then you can wonder what it is that an owl hoot reminds you of.

Ol' lonesome freight train;

low call of the tawny owl

rolls over the roofs.

poetic

Bristol Poetry Festival is about to kick off. Which reminds me that it's about time I wrote something new. Or at least finished writing someting. There are odd scraps of paper lying around with things that may eventually become poems, and things that changed into something else along the way.

Monday I was at Halo in Bristol for Acoustic Night. It was a quiet evening, though in a good way. And Susan Taylor was passing through on her way down to Devon, and did some poems about sheep which came to life for me. The poems that is. So I did a couple of rural-ish haiku, which you can hear on the clip above, thanks to David Bosankoe who looks after the PA and records everything. The chap doing the MC ing is Julian Ramsay-Wade, who is at least as nice as he sounds. Does this all sound a bit lovey? -hey, it was that sort of an evening, OK?

...I listen to my voice and wince. Practice. Practice.

chiffchaff

summer wind
a sparrow re-rights itself
at the peanut cage

Alan Summers

I did this pic to accompany Alan's haiku, for one of the events he's organising in Bath. You can find out more if you follow the link above...

This morning I was sure that I heard a chiffchaff as I wandered around making my first cup of tea. So I took the tea and sat at the open window in the front room.

I heard:

a green woodpecker
wood pigeons
a wren
blackbirds
robins
blue tits
greenfinches
goldfinches
a starling
...and the chiffchaff.

I spotted it a few times, as it flitted from tree to tree; it landed in the plane tree outside the house, the tree that the magpies nested in last year; and gave a burst of song, then came to a branch very close to the window.

I kept perfectly still.

But it decided not to risk it anyway, and bobbed off to the next tree.

At one of my early morning wildlife-related meet-ups at the Downs cafe with Geraldine, Keith and Nick, recently, I met Myles Lucas, who was looking into why birdwatchers watch birds. My explanation was, or would be, something along the lines of 'because they are wild creatures whose space overlaps with ours, and it's interesting to get to know their characters and habits'. There is a lot of wildness going on close by, and it's just as wild as what you see on an African safari (and less likely to eat you too...). And the more you look, the more you see.

International Women's Day

I was invited to participate in a special evening celebrating International Women's Day, at Acoustic Night, the fortnightly event at Halo in Bristol. I felt honoured, and more than a bit daunted; I've been trying to write something new for a while now, and as the evening approached, it was obvious that it wasn't going to be ready.

That wasn't the main cause of the dauntedness, though. That was more to do with the nature of my identity as a woman, and (to a lesser degree) as a poet. On the first of those, my position has been elegantly described by someone else (who prefers to remain anonymous, but thank you!) as 'like someone who has defected from one regime and has taken up residence in another. Figuratively, I now live quietly in my chosen state, bear its nationality, pay its taxes, carry its passport, perform any civic duty it requires of me, I am utterly loyal to it and will defend it to the last.' I do not take acceptance of my identity for granted, and it is nice, and affirming, to experience it in this way.

Anyway. It was a good evening, and there was lots of energy and positivity. I read a haiku, after describing my evolving relationship with my daughter, as she learns to be an adolescent and I learn to be a parent...

Rainy day, new school
Under two separate brollies
But still holding hands.

I wondered later if I should have read the poem I wrote about my mother. I have a bit of difficulty with this poem, and describe it as poetry-as-therapy, and therefore possibly best left alone. But then it also appeared in Becoming Drusilla. Though that is not the same as me introducing it. Anyway, it means something to me. Here it is.

I did not know it then, of course, but it was the last time I saw you.
It was just after my birthday, and I brought my model aeroplane to show you.
It was a Bristol Britannia.
It wasn’t the aeroplane I would have chosen, but I suppose father was preoccupied.
I should have preferred to bring you a Spitfire, a purer flying machine,
So that you would recognize the fighter ace in me.

You were pale and tired, in the hospital bed,
But you gave me a brave smile
As any fighter ace should,
Preparing for a sortie.

Now I think of those days out on the Moss,
Me sitting behind you on the bicycle
Afraid that my feet might get caught in the wheel,
But mostly happy and safe so close to you
While big brother rode on ahead.

And above the flat Lancashire countryside,
With its sudden smells of ditches and chicken manure and cabbage,
A vast world of sky
Made brilliant by the ascending skylark.

chirimiri

Many birds have regional tweaks in their songs – especially blackbirds, chaffinches and willow warblers. Kentish blackbirds often select a phrase similar to part of the third movement of Beethoven’s violin concerto

Geraldine Taylor The Coffee Thrush


After my attempt to sum up How I Attained Enlightenment Through Cycling in fifty words or less (through boko-maru with the pedals, possibly), I got a message from Alan Summers, the haiku man, asking for a single word. He's going to be up on the plinth

I'd like as many people as possible to send me "important words" and I will read out as many as I can during my hour on the plinth.

What's important to you that can be summed up in just one single word?

Is it a word that's important to the world, or is it something personal like someone's name?

All of your important words are welcome whoever you are.

You can give a reason why the word is important to you, but you don't have to. You can include your name, or remain anonymous.

Email your important words to: importantword@withwords.org.uk by 4pm Monday 27th July, or give them to myself or my wife or Beatrice in Trafalgar Square between noon and four o'clock - we'll be the ones collecting important words.

I couldn't think of a portentous sort of word, so I settled for a nice sounding one instead. People who live in rainy places could do with more words to describe rain, probably. And you do seem to get more types in the Wess Vinglun than you do elsewhere. Like that fine, misty drizzle that gets you soaked through in no time at all. The Basques call it chirimiri, I was told by Suzanne who once lived there.

So that's my word. Because it sounds nice. And an attempt to describe it, in seventeen syllables (but not less)

chirimiri

This mist I move through;
I blink it out of my eyes.
My coat’s cold and wet

on specs

I am much too casual with my specs, given that they are such an important part of my life... I was reminded of this yet again last night as I was staring at a six-pack of baked beans in Tesco, wondering how much of a bargain they were, and Katie said, "Why are you looking at dog food?"

Driving home, we saw a great turmoil of dramatic clouds over in the direction of Wales, so as soon as we were inside, I scrambled up onto the roof to get a better look. There's been a lot of weather around lately, some of it involving cumulonimbus clouds, which are always nice to watch... from a distance.

And there, on the roof, were my missing specs, which I'd just resigned myself to having lost irrevocably. I must have put them down on the parapet while photographing balloons on Saturday morning.

It is very happy making, being reunited. It puts things into focus. Here is a haiku I wrote when I once got some new spectacles.

How finely woven
This spider's web by my head.
Thank you, nice new specs!

Here are some shots I took yesterday, spec-less obviously, for publicity stuff for a reading that Richard and I are doing later in the year. If you would like to express a preference for either or neither, I should be glad to hear your opinion...

skylark have you anything to say to me?

The sun warms my face.
I squint and see, high up there,
A skylark sing spring.

Only the other day I was wondering when I'd hear my first skylark of the year. And now I have, on a walk in the Chew valley.

signs of the times

I've been going through my couple-of-hundred photos from last summer's Great Welsh Walk, and filling out the Flickr album a bit. It's a restless business, looking at adventure-ish summer photos. It's getting me thinking of what to do and where to go this year. Summers are too good to waste them not going on expeditions of some sort.

Also reminded me of the infinite variety that there is in campsites. The signs here were on a site at Rhaiadr Gwy, or Rhayader if you prefer. It was nicely-located on the bank of the youthful River Wye, and the showers ran on time, but...

....this is more my sort of place, on a farm high up near Cemaes Head. There were things growing in the shower (singular), and everything was higgledy-piggledy, including, or especially, the landscape.


...and it was Very Nice Too. A rainbow hung over the Teifi estuary as we pitched the tent and the sun reappeared after the rain which had followed us from Hay. We watched a chough haranguing a buzzard high above us, and a whitethroat sang from the adjacent ash tree.

Well, I think it was a whitethroat.



We met this german couple further south. They thought it was hilarious that there was such a complete lack of consistency in british campsites. Look, they're laughing. We were sharing our memories of that shower with things growing in it.

They like that sort of thing. They said they preferred it to the uniformity of european municipal campsites.

Perhaps they're not typical germans.....






...this, on the other hand, is the encampment of a fairly typical Modern Family That Camps. I'm curious; if there is a recognisable demographic thing going on here, then where did this particular group come from? -were they the sort who would have been going on package holidays to Spain twenty years ago? Are they a new growth rather than an evolution? Questions, questions. I suppose I could always pluck up courage and ask them. Lord knows there's no shortage of 'em...



...o well, there's always hit-and-run camping. Melt away with the morning dew, leaving no trace of our passing.

Roll on, summer.

A distant jet plane,
And a blackbird chipping chinks
From the dawn's silence

poetry in motion

This isn't my car, this is Buzz's car. My car went off for its MOT today.

In this strange new land
We name the hills as we pass;
Our feet mark the map.

Well, what with it being LGBT History month, the monthly Bristol Poetry Can event at the Central Library was on-topic, with a reading by Andi Langford-Woods, and a talk on Thom Gunn by a gay bloke who whose name I can't be bothered to remember because his talk was rather dull and he twice referred to "Lesbian Gay and Bisexual Month" despite being outnumbered on the omitted oppressed minority front in that particular event. Bloomin' gays, I dunno...


It was a good event, some rather moving stuff. I threw in a couple of haikus which could be read in an on-topic sort of way, as the pertinent work-in-progress from the Marland pen is on a poetic hard shoulder somewhere waiting for the AA man.

There were also a couple of (presumably) 'normal' people, one of whom announced that "I don't do clever poems." He was right, unfortunately. And a woman who said that she hadn't realised that there was a theme, as though it was something she'd just trodden in. Poets, eh? -mad, bad and dangerous to know. Apparently.

I watched a spoddy boy who spotted Andi reading her stuff and became theatrically amused by it, and took a seat just outside the reading and sniggered to his girlfriend. He was there as I left at the end, and did a weaselly little wolf whistle, just audible; I was last to go, along with Alan Summers, who was telling me about his new gig as poet-in-residence riding the mobile libraries of Herefordshire (I was v envious). I wish I'd gone back and given the spod a good talking to, rather than merely being disdainful... o well, too late now. It'll just take him longer to work out for himself what his issues are. Or not, as the case may be.