a visitor

Yesterday I started to worry at a draft poem that I found in my notebook. It was started a year ago and is provisionally called Monsters.

The appearance of the creature in the photo on my verandah today was entirely fortuitous.

That picture doesn’t give much idea of scale, but if you click you’ll see her full length. She was a good two tiles long and they are 24 cm across. (So, allowing for the ripples, I suppose she was around 18 inches from nose to tail tip.)*

ephemera

 

Along the bridle path
brief worlds
flower and fade

 
 
The words are really only an excuse to post the photo. Sadly, even if you click the picture to enlarge it, it isn’t clear that the ‘dandelion’ globe was around three inches in diameter (approximately 8 cm).

I had to make do with my phone camera yesterday and of course by the time I’d re-charged my camera and went out this morning, there was nothing left. Perhaps I’ll catch the other bud at the right moment.

it’s complicated

It’s May 29th, and apparently that means it’s Royal Oak Day. That in itself is simple enough, but for an angloparlante, discussing oaks trees and acorns with a Spaniard is complicated.

half found

First of all a picture of a spray of lilac. Because it’s April and it’s about time there were lilacs.

And now some talk of poetry. Because it’s April and even if I’m not managing a poem a day, I am trying to focus a bit more than I sometimes do.

I posted a ‘found poem’ in Spanish a few days ago (yesterday’s poem) along with an unsatisfactory translation into English. In fact the bus station notice about ‘security recommendations’ that the text was taken from used to be much longer and much more detailed. It had caught my attention in the past and I found an old copy of the complete version in my notebook.

This time I have taken more liberties with the ‘translation’, although none of the ideas in the poem are entirely mine: they all come from the Spanish original.

seeing for yourself

As I’ve said before on the blog (of pigs and poetry), I’ve had in mind for years now to write a poem about la matanza, but have never actually witnessed a pig slaughter. I’d just about psyched myself up to do so this year, but when the time came, the neighbour and his helpers only hobbled the pigs with ropes and then drove them away squealing.

Even this tile – given me recently by a fellow poet who hoped, I think, that it would inspire me to finish the piece I took in to the writers’ group for commentary back in December – isn’t a lot of help as it doesn’t seem to show the actual killing.

I was reminded of the fact I was prepared to witness a slaughter in order to be able to write about it when I was reading during my coffee break this morning.