Bees and butterflies

Bee on cosmos

For over a week I've been laid up with arthritis. I can't walk, work or sleep. It not only hurts, it shrinks my world, confines me to my own back yard. 

The butterflies and the bees are a consolation. I wasn't quick enough to catch the peacock butterfly on the buddleia, but I did get a shot of a bee on the cosmos. If this picture had a soundtrack, you would hear the bee purring contentedly. 

Of quills and pens

As I sit on the bench next to a little hump-backed bridge over the canal, something catches my eye. A goose feather flutters in the breeze. A long tapering wing feather, needing only a nick from a pen-knife to make it into a quill. 

It's goose grey, that colour which is neither grey nor brown, but both. It is darker on the leading edge. I bring it home. I rarely bring finds home, but this feels so apt, so writerly, I must have it. 

Poet's note: Fire on Blackstone Edge

The traffic on the road outside my house is at a standstill and in both directions. Something is wrong, but I don't know what. 

All around me the hills are parched and brown, a dry, scorched ochre. Drought coloured. Tinder coloured. As I cross the field that leads to the towpath I can see smoke. The moors below Blackstone Edge are on fire and Halifax Road has been closed, hence the traffic.  A helicopter whirrs slowly and loudly towards the source of the smoke. Crows and jackdaws fly up in small, explosive groups, lucky to be flying free of danger. 

The air is humid. I can feel my hair frizz. Drought and humidity, not a comfortable combination. On the canal, all is calm, the fire hidden from view by the slope of the hill. A large flock of Canada Geese paddle slowly by. Swallows swoop low over the water.  The heatwave has produced a surfeit of flies; There are so many buzzing around in my living room that I have bought some carniverous plants, a venus flytrap and a pitcher plant, but I don't think they will rid me of the flies, for the plants are very small and the flies are very large. A swallow would have been a better bet.

The butterflies are back

The butterflies are back. A handful of tortoiseshells, a host of small meadow browns, all feeding on elder blossom, bramble flowers and honeysuckle.

Was ever  a gal as elegant as the honeysuckle? Who else could wear reds and pinks and yellows and not clash? And her perfume! A fragrance from my childhood, a waft of Somerset here in this Pennine valley.

Poet's notes: heatwave

In this heat the canal is the place to be. In it, beside it, or on it. Even the geese, which usually gather in the rough pastures on the eastern bank are floating on the water in a loose, silent gaggle. A fish flips lazily up and sinks back down again. A moorhen stands in the shallows, grooming her charcoal grey plumage with an orange-red bill. Mallards bicker in the shadows.

House martins swoop low, hunting down insects and occasionally skimming the surface of the water to take a drink, their tiny beaks agape. All except the martins look tired and scruffy. the martins must be used to temperatures up in the high twenties, but for the rest of us, it's getting too much.

Poem: The shadows thrown by millstone grit

Landscape or topographical poetry isn’t popular, or, at least, far too many people have told me they ‘don’t like landscape poetry’.  

I wonder what they mean. Are they saying the writings of John Clare, William Wordsworth, and, from the valley next to this, Ted Hughes, are of no worth? Probably not. I think they must fear sentimentality, but also, I suspect, they have no idea that the landscape is an active partner in the writing process.

Throughout my life I have been attentive to place. I’ve lived in many different parts of Britain: Bath, where I was born; Peterborough; Richmond; Uxbridge; Harrogate; Sheffield, Manchester, and now, here in the South Pennines. Always on the edge of a town, and almost always near a canal.

I can pull a poem out of each of these places - even Peterborough, which I left when I was only four years old - for the place that I inhabit is an extension of me. I’m attentive to where I live. I project my thoughts and memories onto the landscape and in turn it projects its concerns on to me. And something comes out of that exchange.

The shadows thrown by millstone grit

From where I’m sitting I can see the hills.

The sun’s shining and tomorrow

the clocks will go forward.

Something catches my eye;

a hiker climbing up to Blackstone Edge,

the jizz of him young and fit.

I don’t know where memories come from,

only that they turn up unexpectedly,

and demand to be let in.

Why today, when the sun’s shining

on moor and millstone grit, should I recall

a cousin dead these fifty years?

I cannot see his face, but his hair’s still fair,

and his hands still slender,

his nails bitten to the quick.

I was eleven, he eighteen.

Between us, there existed a polite affection.

He took his own life.

No-one told me why, or how, or thought

even that I might grieve, my being still a child,

and he a cousin I saw only twice a year.

But I did grieve.

I still do.

© Sheila Wild

A poet's notes from Blackstone Edge

Apoet'snotesfromBlackstoneEdge – what do I intend by this? I don’t yet know. Writing’s often like that. I don’t know what I’m going to write until I’ve written it. And I’m not good at blogging. 

Blogging calls for an immediate write-up, but I like to reflect on what I write. Poetry suits me. However . . . . I’m growing older, and running out of time, and as there are many things I want to write about, I’d better get blogging. Perhaps I’m hoping a blog will take me somewhere new. But then too, as a writer, I want to share, and right now what I most want to share is the valley that I live in. If this blog has a focus, it’s the short stretch of canal that runs between the ancient hamlet of Warland and the small town of Littleborough. I live mid-way between the two.

The Rochdale Canal near Littleborough 
C Sheila Wild

I’ve spent most of my life living near a canal – the Avon and Kennet, the Union, the Leeds and Liverpool, and now the Rochdale Canal. The landscape hereabouts is beautiful. It's full of history; its roots reach back to the Mesolithic era. And you don’t have to look far to discover that it’s full of wildlife. 

It’s not a challenging landscape, but my trekking days  are long gone. These days I walk like an ageing Labrador, stiff-legged and with a list to the right. Even with orthopaedic shoes I can only walk a couple of miles. So, this small, tight valley with buses that can ferry me over the difficult bits, suits me very well. It's what I have to hand, and it's what I'll write about.