BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

May 2017

  • May in the Territory of Rain

    sunny garden 1

    Well not so much territory of rain this week. It is beautifully hot and sunny, and  after everything in the garden hanging fire for about a fortnight, it has all started happening at once. Seeds have grown (but so have a million weeds), the thyme and sage have come into flower, and I have started harvesting. Chives are in the freezer and I have made tarragon and basil vinegar.

    I’ve found some chickweed

    not this plant, I hasten to add – it is very near to territory marking posts of dogs and foxes – and I am infusing it into oil. I’ve done the same for cleavers (I wish I could say they weren’t from my garden, but they are), and I’ve made some hawthorn flower tincture

    I will be drying the thyme and sage,

    plus some lovely sprays of eucalyptus and bay my friend Rita Bradd brought me, when she came to discuss editing her new pamphlet of poems, which will be out in September. She also brought me a hand of ginger, and as I noticed a little growth spur on it, I’ll be planting up a division of it to see if I can grow it on. There are cuttings to take too, so I am looking forward to a very busy weekend.

    Elsewhere, the black backed gulls have pretty much moved on from their old nesting site. I only counted three yesterday, nesting on chimney pots. But on the plus side, there are more housemartins and swallows and swifts than ever, and I hope they will rear broods successfully. The robins abandoned their nest in the ivy pot, but they must have found somewhere else because there are baby robins and blue tits in the garden. The magpies that were a problem in other years seem to have taken themselves off, so the small birds are very active. There are frogs and newts in the pond, and I’m hoping this year will repair some of the damage last year’s cold and wet did to our wildlife.

  • The Journey – an Exhibition by Christine McIver

    My artist friend Christine McIver has an exhibition in the Dunblane Museum until the 29th May. It is called The Journey – Images of Migration and the picture here – which doesn’t do justice to the impact and haunting atmosphere of the actual painting – is called The Lost Boys.

    Like many of us Christine was deeply affected by the current migration crisis and the plight of refugees, made more poignant by the realisation that many of us in the Central Belt are descended from migrants ourselves, particularly from Ireland. As she worked in watercolours on rice paper, she says

    “the illustrative style of the work reflects the idea that migratory journeys are not confined to one generation but become part of our ancestral story.

    The people who are brave enough to make these journeys are the ancestors of our future civilisations.”

    I found the paintings beautiful, and intensely moving. I have loved Christine’s work for many years, but this exhibition seems like a new departure, and has an added depth and confidence. You can see more of Christine’s work here:

    All the artist’s proceeds of the exhibition will be shared between the Scottish Refugee Council and the Maryhill Integration Network, so that is an added reason to go and see it while it lasts.

     

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  • The Charm of Nine Herbs – The Methods

    Mugwort, plantain which lives facing the sun, lambscress, burdock,chamomile, nettle, crab apple thyme and fennel

    • a salve for keeping thus: chop the leaves finely and mix with the apple pulp and a salve base.
    • a plaster or fomentation – make a paste of water and ash, and mix the fennel with oil and beaten egg. You can use a salve before and after.
    • Sing this charm three times over the herbs before you work them, and also over the apple. Sing it over the patient, (both mouth and ears) and over the wound each time you apply the salve.

    This part involves more than average guesswork, as the text seems more than a little garbled. You will note that it is prose and not poetry for what it’s worth, and also that this bit substitutes lambscress for houseleek. Perhaps this is a substitution the scribe made because houseleek was less available locally, but the word is ‘lombescyrse’, so this is not just a best guess. The word for crabapple is different too, ‘wudusuræppel’ rather than ‘wergulu’, so the prose addition may have been made in a different part of the country from the poetry. This may explain the Odin and Christian references too – we are looking at an amalgamated text.

    I am interested in the singing. In later monastic practice, time was measured in the length of time it takes to say prayers, and it may be that singing the charm was the same sort of thing. But in the light of the religious references, perhaps we can guess that to the Saxons, just as physical healing was also a redemptive act, and not just a metaphor for salvation, spiritual healing brought genuine comfort and strength, and was not just a placebo.

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