Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 38

Random word generator

I’m posting this now because I won’t have time tomorrow until late. Not sure what I think about this selection of words but that’s what we’ve got.

Re-mundaning the wild day 3

For Paul Brookes’ challenge, a trio of badger’s hexastiches.

Essential badger

Badger,
head gardener,
snuffles through dead leaf drifts,
culling slugs and snails, turns
soft earth, digs drains,
ditcher.

And when
autumn rain floods
the high fields, and run-off
seeps and rises beneath
the floors, we call
badger.

You need
drains, they told us,
a competent digger
engineer of earth-works
who better than
badger?

This garden

The Oracle knows what’s on my mind.

This garden

This garden soothes like the breast of the sea,
like the shell of an egg in a wild bird’s nest,
like a pebble as pale as herons’ wings,
in the rippling shallows beneath the sun.
It soothes like the head of a long-lost dog,
laid on my lap, the look in his eyes
deep as the sea, soft as foam and feathers,
confused with those wisps of hurrying clouds.

Remembering the first dog

Remembering the first dog

We walked, the dogs and I,
through green wet and fissured clay,
fox-dug and earth heaps scattered,

through the upright brown compost
of chicory, twigs broken from oak
and ash, and the chatter of jays.

We followed tracks and prints
and smelly signs and stopped
a moment at the grave’s edge,
where rose cuttings thrive.

Small hoof-prints pattern
the soft earth, and rabbits have left him
their jet-shiny beads,

and I am pleased
he has the company.
Memories are real.

Re-wild the mundane day 2

In answer to Paul Brookes’ hedgehog and tea towel questions which you can see here (WP can feck off with it’s stupid questions).

Once were tea towels

smart-checked and striped,
holes now united by threadbare,
unravelled warp and weft,
linted and loose-threaded,
shoe-cleaners, floor-wipers,
the unnameable rags
that line forgotten places.

~Not all forgotten, not by all~

a hedgehog home, deep in the pile
of cracked roof tiles and bricks,
beam splinters ancient plaster,
is lined with linen, embroidered with oak leaves,
spiked and span, gathered by prickles,
wind holes filled with moss,
a winter sleep away from spring.

Wistful thinking

Before I post my poem, I’d like to ask if anyone else gets messages from Word Press? I just opened this ‘new post’ and there was a question waiting on the blank page: What technology could you do without and why?
It’s usually an instruction: Type/to choose a block. I have never been asked questions out of the blue before. What’s going on???? It disappeared when I started to type. WP is going completely nuts!

Anyway, here is a random sort of a poem for the dverse prompt, constructed from the final lines of a dozen of my most recent poems. All from November. They almost work as a poem which surprises me.

Wistful thinking

Here, among the deep trees,
that stretched for a thousand years,
our dim-deep earthy pools
are sunk in billows of fog.

For the night never dreams
in silver and gold,
of another sun upon my face,
pale and elusive as swansdown.

All anger stripped away,
and sunfire blazing in the west
the netting of the stars
as they dance in the tide,
into the sweep of these arms,
is too heavy to bear.
The price of humanity.
But, oh! The stars!

Too many mornings

Editing this post to add a second short poem, a badger’s hexastitch for Colleen’s last post of the year. It’s a version of the original poem beneath the photo.

Badger’s foggy morning

Cold clings
fence wire dripping
with fog-damp bird-silence
in these liminal days
of the year’s grey
dog-end.

Too many mornings

of imprecision
of cold-clinging
damp-falling
when trees are ghostly galleons
and clouds are seas
and the thin ribbon of the moon
is sunk in billows of fog.

Night warden

A poem for Paul Brookes’ challenge to re-wild the mundane and/or re-mundane the wild. Today we’re dealing with foxes (or toasters). If you’d like the join in, the details are here.
I’d like to add that most of the elements of this story are true.
Franz Marc provided the illustration.

Night warden

Where the kitchen stove glows
still warm, cats dream,
and mice dance with stray crumbs,
nudge loose-fitting lids,
chew holes in the mesh
of the food safe.

Padding soft, almost silent,
the fox in the attic descends
the cold stairs, grey-ghost,
in search of fat mice,

where cats stretch in sleep,
in the stove-glow,
their dreams full of tiny squeals.

News and a small poem

The news is that I have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Black Bough Poetry for my poem Wisdom, that took second place in the Dai Fry Award for Mystical Poetry.

This is the small poem.

Day grows from green to gold to white

Through dim light we watch
mimosa leaves raining
confetti-coins
wrapped in gold foil
egrets meadow-stalking
stilt-legged and long-beaked
in raiment of monarchs.

Last sun finds the fent
in the cloud-cloak
and dim day swells
into a regal evening.

Cloudshapes day 30

Final day of the clouds challenge. Thank you Paul Brookes, Gaynor Kane and Julian Day for your wonderfully inspiring photography. It has been a pleasure finding adequate words to accompany it. You can see the last set of photos here.

Worlds in the sky

All worlds are there, here,
just out of reach, above birds,
borne on their wings,
wind-patterned,

fashioned by snow and sand
from desert oceans, ice fields,
forests of cloud-trees, frost ferns.

Night and day are cradled there,
the stars, moonlight silver and sun-gold.

We reach up to mould malleable cloud
to our fancies, our fears,
never touching their self-creation.

Feet tethered by unseen currents
to clay and the rippling pelt of the earth,
we yearn for weightlessness,
to overcome the mockery of birds.

Perhaps we should learn to love
what we have, the green, the blue,
the flower-carpet, the columned cathedral-treed,
the river-running and ocean-lapping.

Before it is too late.