William

It's wonderful when a young lad approaches you at a reading to say how much he likes one of your poems. William told me he liked The Squirrel poem very much and that he and his mum sing it together, following Polly Bolton's musical setting of the poem.
So for William, from Ludlow, and anyone else who likes squirrels, here's the poem:

The Squirrel

sparks from branch to branch,
an arc of energy, ferris wheel,
small explosion,
whip of current
loosed among the trees.

Sometimes

I haven't posted a poem on this blog for a long time, so while I have been thinking and writing about gardens and flowers, here's a garden poem:

Sometimes

all it takes to be happy
is a line of washing
drying gently in the sun,
a fork stuck in a border,
sunlight falling through leaves,

striking the gold rim
of the blackbird's eye
as it watches from the fence
for the digging to be done.



This is one of my poems that was set to music by singer and choir leader Polly Bolton and performed at the recent Much Wenlock Poetry Festival.

Weeks of Perfume

In Chester near where I live the lime trees are all in flower and the scent is magnificent. Bees love these flowers. Years ago when I was ill in a local cottage hospital the night nurse Theresa told me how one hot summer she came home one day to find her lawn covered in drunk bumble bees - they'd overdosed on the lime tree outside her house and couldn't move! A bit like the way humans behave on Friday nights in Chester....

It's a time of perfume; lavender is in bloom in my garden, the rose Albertine, and sweet rocket, that old-fashioned cottage flower that few people grow now but I grow it near a seat. At night its scent fills the garden.
Privet is in flower too and its scent always takes me straight back to a house I once lived in by the sea. It had a "burgage" garden, a very long, thin strip of land bordered by privet hedges (nearly three hundred yards of hedge- a lot of cutting!). In the evening, to stroll down the path was to be accompanied by the flutter and dart of hundreds of night moths feeding on the privet blossom. Further down the garden there was a dense bed of evening primrose and in June this was always the site of ghost swift moths dipping and lifting over the flowers, like frail floating scraps of paper.. I have always tried to plant my gardens to attract insects; a summer without insect hum and flight is no summer at all.
In my garden here I have a self-seeded thick stand of poppies and in the morning when they open the flowers are full of bees and hoverflies; as the day goes on and the petals fall on these highly ephemeral flowers the bees move on to the borage and the lavender. I so love to watch them. A good stretch of "sitting and staring", or standing and staring, as W H Davies recommended is called for in these fine summer days of glorious scent and fulsomeness.