Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 61

Lost

Well, that respite wasn’t. We’ve had the usual 37°C 98.6°F and the temperatures start to rise again officially from Monday for seven days. No rain before September. It’s too much.

Lost

Words fail
like the source in the valley
the unopened buds
and the fledglings that will never fly
the cool blue air of autumn.

Eggs

Photo ©Adrian Haverkamp Song Thrush eggs

Eggs

Spring was eggs
pale blue and warm
smooth and round as moons

nestled in downy secret
shaded and dappled
with new leaves.

The dry earth has spawned pebbles
round and smooth as moons.
They lie baking in the dust

but nothing with burst
from this crust
no feathered fragility

as the only rose
is in this dawn sky
and the dust will never blossom
with no rain.

Another burning day

Another burning day
we close the windows
and shutters tight
against the heat
the light too bright
and the desolate sight
of the tinder brown
that once was verdant meadow.

We walked in the early morning

We walked in the early morning

We walked in the early morning
but no dew damped the grass
the heat already lay in wait

and we wondered if the earth had ever rested,
if the paws and feet that trod the night
had ever waded through a gentle sea

for the sun was a yellow devil
an eye unblinking and the tender blue
of spring a steely sheet of unbearable glare.

We walked the early morning
through a thin veil of dust
golden motes igniting the air

where dragonflies hover
hunting low impervious to the sun
their mechanism in tune
to this deathly stillness.

The old cat in the sun

The first version is six lines of six syllables each. Since the poem is about a cat, I did a second version in nine lines of nine syllables each.

The old cat in the sun 1

The old cat in the porch
lets the heat seep into
the marrow of her bones,
sleeping where lizards bask,
in the thin shade of leaves
and the sun’s fierce silence.

The old cat in the sun 2

The old cat in the porch is sleeping,
indifferent to the heat, lets it
seep into the marrow of her bones,
sleeping where lizards bask, immobile,
where the desert breeze, through shrivelled stalks,
sends dapples dancing, elusive shade,
and in the crisp clatter of leaf-fall,
deaths, cut adrift by the mother tree,
she hears only the sun’s fierce silence.

Drought

August is usually hot and dry, but this year July was too, and June. Wildfires and water shortages, rivers so low the fish are dying, this summer has been a national emergency. I posted this earlier today, but August doesn’t mean anything else this year, so I’m adding it to the dverse ‘August’ prompt.

Drought

I picked blackberries again,
all that seems to flourish
in this wasted summer,

and beneath my feet,
the ashes of clover and vetch,
yellow dust rising

that should bind deep,
damp and sweet,
growing green roots and shoots.

Morning walk

It’s too hot to be out for most of the day, so I take the dogs out earlyish. Walking too early can be problematic because there are still lots of wild animals about, so we wait until 8.30 when the night folk will be hidden away.

I stick to the lane when I’m alone, where the risk of distractions is less. Even at midday there are rabbits and deer about at the edge of the fields…

though Redmond often has to wait patiently while Bix investigates every grasshopper, lizard and mouse he sees in the ditch.

The woods at the side of the lane are full of interesting ‘things’.

and the edge of the corn field at the bottom of the hill is a favourite hang-out for wild boar.

Back home.

The meadows still look pretty, but the earth is bone dry and so fissured it’s hard to walk across.

Even the north side of the house is mainly dry stalks, but the chicory flowers still manage to make a picture.

Haibun for a home in the sky

For the dverse prompt. We moved from Paris to Laon in Picardie after our fourth child was born. It’s a lovely little town, perched on a rocky outcrop, with a beautiful cathedral. The stone masons honoured the oxen that had drawn the stone up from the plain to build the cathedral by placing their statues in niches of the two main towers.

Photo ©Uoaei1

It went up and up, the road winding about the rock, through woods, vertical trunks clinging to slopes were vines grew once, the new road taking longer because the old one, cobbled more than 800 years ago, was too steep for modern vehicles. Ox carts managed though, even laden with building stone.

Time sits on branches
bowed beneath birds and leaves
never stumbling.

Through the arched gateway of the city walls, towered, watchful, and still climbing to the centre of this world in the sky. Cobbled paths met, converged and merged on the cathedral parvis, and my gaze rose above the statued portals, above the rosaces and their coloured glass, sombre on the wrong side of the light, to the towers, the light, airy towers where stone oxen looked down, as they will forever, in pride at what they had achieved.

Silent as stone
lichen-grey and green as spring
cathedral.

The slanted light of memory

Paul Brookes is celebrating Yorkshire Day by publishing works inspired by Yorkshireness. You see them here.

Painting by Julian Onderdonck.

The slanted light of memory

In the hiss of the breeze in the poplars,
where the shadows grow hot and pale,
in the cry of the red kites out hunting,
as they glide through a brazen sky,
in the warbler’s lament for the spring green,
lost in this brittle dust,
I think I hear bright streams running,
though this clay is baked and dry.

I hear the voices of starlight,
across the years and the miles,
and remember the taste of the morning rain
and puddle-splash, cold hands, the snow,
the red-raw bite of the east wind,
and summers of swallow-soft days.

It’s the song of the north, I remember,
distant but always the same,
unchanging, like light on those far hills
where stones graze, the cow with her calf.

Cloud combat

The heat continues, no end in sight and no rain. The trees are dying and new wildfires start every day. We are on red alert. Meanwhile, in a house up on the hill, holiday visitors have been partying and letting off fireworks for three nights running. Fireworks. These are adult human beings, they have the right to vote, decide the future for all of us. Complete and utter connards.

Cloud combat

Above the parched and drought of dying day,
the sky paints with ash and fire
a fight, combat of cocks,
anger sharpened and spurred
by desolation, of dead chicks perhaps,
or the rocky river course
that once glinted blue-gold in the sun.

We hoped them harbingers of storm,
hoped for rain to fall instead of sand,
but the cloud combat curls in silence,
painted in ash, for all to see,
yet few will watch to witness
the outcome, the fallen feathers
dispersed by the wind.