The conversation

Under a pale sun - not cool,just
grey and calm - the words
flowed. Dissonance and history,
patronage and eternal things,
maths and music and the links or
not links were tossed about,
resolved and questioned,
worried and smoothed against the demons
that might darken a day.
And all around the earnest talk
the birdsong fluttered in the unthinking light,
the peerless technique of the singers
rising and falling among the flowers,
its challenge merely territorial
its  beauty only in our minds.

©C.M.M 07/11

Recalling summer

I've posted the last of my Herefordshire poems from this summer. You can read it here. As I look out at the grey dampness of a bleak Scottish end-of-summer day, I can just feel the warmth of that garden where there was so much life.

The poem itself seemed to come out in a new form. Maybe I was infected by the sudden short rushes of the birds I was watching - the four stresses in each line certainly remind me of the moment. A warming remembrance on this greyest of afternoons.

Horticultural poem

There's a new poem over at frankenstina - one of two that came of a desire to capture all that was happening in the wonderful garden of our friends in Herefordshire. Photos do it, up to a point, but there was so much around me that words seemed necessary.

There is one more poem from this holiday - I'll get round to it soon!

A midsummer night's ....

It is 9.45 pm. The sky is still bright, blue overhead but grey and rainy-looking over Gourock. Our garden is filled with the scent of Philadelphus and the stink of next-door's cheminea - or whatever you call these pot-bellied stove efforts with which modern aspirationals attempt to bring indoors outdoors (or is it the other way round?) In the town below, the yoof yell occasionally. This is midsummer in Dunoon.

Actually I fear that the young next doors are having an "empty", and that they lack the necessary fire-raising skills to produce heat without smoke. I don't actually think they need heat, as the evening is almost oppressively warm. I don't care for this fashion of taming one's garden and then sitting resolutely in it in all but a downpour. In these parts you need to burn so many anti-midge devices that the garden smells like a High Mass in full swing.

Be that as it may, I'm going to compose myself for sleep before midnight, as I have to be up betimes (wonderful expression). Yoof, the fires of hell, incense ... I must ignore them all. To sleep, perchance to dream ....