Listening to the moon

The full moon woke me last night. Crept inside the curtains, smiled across the room, smiled so loudly I knew it was her before I opened my eyes. And so I drew back the curtains at 3.48 and wrote in that strange pool of white light until it shifted behind chimney stacks and a high slanting roof.

Moments of bright calm before IT begins!!

IT is the writing course I'm about to start at this Arvon centre. And the niggle is that old one of mine about having to sit at a desk. You know how it is with me - I'd rather be hunched under a tree in a gale than sitting in a row of silence, or walking out in that moonlight instead of looking at walls.

There are wild moors and wooded valleys on the doorstep. I'll be staying in a house once owned by Ted Hughes, up the road from the cemetery where Sylvia Plath is buried, on the edge of the great expanses of moorland that inspired works like Wuthering Heights. So, you know where I'll be before and after the workshop sessions!

Who knows how it will be. I'll let you know. But after that, November will be upon us and that means the wonderful "Thirty days and nights of literary abandon" that is Nanowrimo!! After last year's experience, I've signed up for another try. Anyone else joining in?

Alchemy

wooden beach huts

gold foil embers

wall held shallows

inky runaways

camera jog

lamps rehearse their signature

Martins

Click!

Swooping dives doodle the cliffs. Puts your head in a spin just to watch them. And you realize that human eyes are simply too slow to follow even one of these flights.

I feel their blur past my head, watch them fall into the photo shoot light that bounces back off white cliffs, hear them call to each other from flight paths that never collide. Far below, the parabolas seem to stay in sight longer against the blue of a wind brushed sea whose sound has been blown ahead and out of itself. But the birds are riding the air surf here, across the faces of the highest cliffs.

Too late for swallows. These are martins. Sand martins live here and dig their burrows in the sandy top layer of the cliffs. And the house martins who joined them were over on a trip from barns and cottages to join in the insect feast.

The weather was bleak and I got cold, dragged myself inside to have tea, but I could see their threads across the window panes and know I'll be thinking about them all day.

I was doodling and playing with some shots when the flash went off and helped create this strange merging. And it seemed like the stones I was arranging might have been watching those bird flights as well.

And then as I walked for home through the heath, the remains of seed heads were dancing their own doodling curves above the last of the blackberries.

***

For a short period of time, you can read another of my poems - Summer's end here where it has been selected as part of the poetry twentyten project. The post has been added to since it's first date in 2009, so there are 17 poems by different writers and the page will close and move to this blog here when it reaches 20!

Thanks to Gwilym Williams aka Poet in Residence for posting my piece.

Blue and orange

Up the hill from a spilled out bar,

a roaring crowd and no-one you know......

Read the rest of this new poem called Blue and orange by clicking here.

It's posted on Gordon Mason's blog Catapult To Mars.

Thanks to Gordon for posting it.

Falling sun

Long shadows in the last rage of sunset.

Every wall screens gestures warped by the falling sun.

We all walk ahead of a mimicking giant.

Even the stones.

National Poetry Day 2010

It's National Poetry Day and this year's theme is Home.

Why not be radical and read or write a poem today, or several? And why not let rip and READ IT OUT LOUD even if no-one else is listening?

There are lots of events to celebrate, and not just for today. You can read lots of poetry, browse thoughts about this year's theme from a whole range of poets and find out about events near you by clicking here. Enjoy!

Leftovers

Click!

It wasn't the best place to be today. The high tide line was a feast for every fly in the nation picking over what the crows and gulls had cast aside. Seaweed soup still slick and glutinous on the shore. Helpless claws of broken crabs. Left overs of the leftovers.

There were treasures I couldn't face picking up, they were just so slimy. But as I struggled to climb out of my own footsteps on screes of heaped-up stones, I saw it. And it looked at me and I looked back. Just about the only beach find that didn't need dousing in a bucket full of clean water. It's a piece of wood with the texture of coal. The size of my palm.

I discovered, sadly, that I don't have the camera or the expertise to photograph it as it is. So, I let the software help me turn some of my shots into the kind of scenes I would love to have painted. And it made me happy.......