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 Arsonists

At 4 am the eastern sky changes from dark blue to pale gold. The wind, which has been blowing all night, is pushing the poplars from side to side. Twelve miles to the south and again ten miles to the west, the moors are on fire. For a week now hundreds of men and women have been beating down the flames, grappling hoses up steep slopes, and digging fire breaks, but the wind fans the flames and joins fire to fire. Deep below the surface the peat is burning darkly. It will be weeks before the burning is quenched.

Fires are common on the moors, the loss of wildlife and livestock an annual wounding. Almost always the cause is arson.

The arsonists

As soon as the bell pits have dried out,

the arsonists move in.

The flames burn upwards at first,

then sideways, then every which way,

pushed about by the wind.

Larks can fly free,

but the beetles are torched,

and so are the tiny gem-like snails,

the skippers, who yesterday danced 

their mating dance, the quick, bronze lizards,

and this year’s lambs, still

too young to know where not to run.

Sometimes, like a curtain flapping in the breeze,

the smoke clears.

The moor is scorched and flattened.

The farmer closes his eyes.

He doesn’t want to look.

He’s exhausted. He’s enraged, but also defeated.

The fire will get everything.

And the arsonists?

They stand in the shadow of an old stone barn,

watching the fire turn predator,

listening for the sirens

screaming up from the road below.

Soon, where the moor was,

is a black emptiness.

Maybe this is what the arsonists want,

a darkness where nothing moves.

Maybe despair is their best excuse.

C Sheila Wild

Haiku: heron

It's almost ten o’clock, but still full daylight, when I walk home from the station. High above me swifts are wheeling and screaming. Not a crowd, but an ample covey.

As I unlock my front door a heron cronks its way over to Gorsey Hill Wood. The sun is easing down behind the hill and its afterglow gentles the heron’s underbelly to a pale gold.

You are old, Old Man

of the Woods, your take-off tired,

trailing legs stick-thin

C Sheila Wild

No butterflies

The weather is unusually hot, over 30 degrees Celsius, and has been for a couple of days, with more to come. The jackdaws are feeling it, wobbling unsteadily on the rim of the bird bath and drinking deep. One stands on the ground for several minutes, its beak agape.  It looks dazzled and perplexed.

I take advantage of the heat to repaint the wooden tubs in my back yard. The paint dries immediately, takes another coat in twenty minutes.

Despite the cosmos and the buddleia, the wallflowers and fuchsias, there are no butterflies. Last year I saw dozens – peacocks, red admirals, tortoiseshells – but this year, not so much as a cabbage white. I hope the hard winter hasn't done for them.

Pens, policy and poetry

I’m finding this hard. I can do brief, but I can’t do conversational.

I’m a policy analyst, one who probes and, eventually, reaches a conclusion. In complete contrast, I’m also  a poet, one who attends to the moment.

I aspire to an intimacy of language, but when I write prose, even as I’m doing now, the analytical urge is strong.

I’ve changed pens from a V5 TecPoint to a Parker Jotter, from black ink to blue. The Jotter writes faster, is less forensic. Blue is less self-assured, more exploratory. 

But I have to own, my writing skills are not as reliable as I’d thought.

Photonote: Bramble Blossom

Bramble Blossom
C Sheila Wild

Trickster Jay

In some mythologies the jay is a trickster or boundary crosser, a beautiful, boastful and wholly necessary guide to the otherworld. For me it's a bird of good omen and I welcome their occasional visits to my garden.

Every year, when the youngsters have fledged, the parent birds bring them to my bird-feeder, as though to say ‘if you’re ever in trouble, this is where you come’. 

And so, this afternoon, I see a young jay perched on the fence. He has been in nature’s dressing-up box. He sports an outsized moustache and is wearing baggy pantaloons in a delicious shade of peachy-pink. His jacket is much too big for him.

He will lose the breath-taking vividness of youth, but the luminosity, the exquisite colouring of his plumage will remain. If you saw only the flash of sapphire on his wing, you would think him beautiful, but there is so much more, the startlingly white rump, the neatly pied tale, the sophisticated pinks and greys of his back and chest.  Our very own bird of paradise.

Poem: Little Gods

What is my intention in writing these notes? To say something about the writing of poetry? Not what is taught in poetry classes, but the friction point in the hazel twig, the spark taking hold.

And thus, fear of the dark and the strangeness of herons combine to make a poem.  

I'd been startled by a soft thud above my head. A heron had landed on the conservatory roof. I’d never seen a heron at such close quarters, and certainly not from underneath. It settled itself, raking its impossibly long thin toes across the Perspex. It was an unnerving sound, as other-worldly as the bird’s pterodactyl-like appearance, but it was a sound I recognise, one that late at night had often frightened me. That herons are out and about in the dark I know, for I’ve seen one fishing in the river at midnight, but it hadn’t occurred to me they would land on my roof.

Little Gods

Herons hunch

on the roof ridge,

grey as

imagined terrors,

little gods

to be placated

lest they give me

the evil eye.

© Sheila Wild

Poem - Roch meadows

Leather jackets:larvae of crane flies, found in moist or wet cushions of moss.

Crane flies, or ‘daddy long legs’. Over 300 species in the UK. Most common is Tilupa Paludosa, April through to October

Roch meadows, 11^th June 2018

buttercups and bistort,

soft rush and sorrel;

in the middle of

the water meadow

a crow listens out

for leatherjackets

© Sheila Wild

Poem - Blackbirds

3 a.m. I watch the sun rise over Blackstone Edge. A full moon emerges from a bank of cloud. The moon and the sun seen in the same arc of sky - I should get up more often at this very early hour!

5 a.m. there's a faint mist, a blurring of the sight. The mist calms the jackdaws; their calls drop from frantic to conversational. A blackbird is singing most beautifully. Another answers him. Somewhere there is a thrill of blue tits.

By 6 a.m. the birds are silent. Are they, like me, going back to sleep?

Blackbirds

a merl of blackbirds strikes up,

if not virtuosi,

then choice performers,

their coda a scattering

of apple blossom

on a well-kept lawn

© Sheila Wild

Poet's note: a posse of herons

In 2011 there were sixteen nests in the heronry. This year, the winter of 2017 having been so hard, there are only three.

The male birds arrive at the end of December to eye up the old nests and work out what needs fixing. The heronry is an old one, and so the nesting platforms are huge untidy affairs of branches and twigs fetched up from the surrounding trees. Once the females have arrived, courtship begins. It's a surprisingly graceful ceremony of neck stretching and beak snapping, and once it's over, the birds begin to rebuild their nest. Repairing the nest is a leisurely process - herons do everything slowly - the male flying in with building material, the female reweaving the platform. 

Herons begin incubating their eggs as early as February, and I know when incubation has begun, because I can see the females hunkered down on the nest platforms. The males fly in with food, their long necks outstretched and stuffed full of frogs and fish. The birds remind me of planes coming in to land. They're so ungainly I wonder if they're going to make it, but each heron carefully lines himself up and taxis slowly into his allotted docking space, within easy reach of his mate's hungry beak. 

The parent birds are so large I don't need binoculars to see them, and even the chicks are big enough to be seen peering over the edge of the nest. Heron chicks are scrawny and scruffy with the most fantastical punk hair-dos, spiky quiffs of off-white feathers. 

I wonder what its' like to be a chick growing up in a year with so few nests. Is the heronry uncannily quiet? Is the room service better than usual, or has the hard winter killed off the food supply too? Are the few remaining parents unduly anxious? Is three nests enough, I wonder. Will the heronry survive?

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