BurnedThumb

The sky is full of birds.
Five skeins of barnaacle geese
take their noisy bustle eastward.
Starlings are raucous in the cypress tree
and four mute swans sail stately
between the river and the hill.

It’s been a busy few weeks! First of all we had ten days without water as the pipes coming in to our house froze solid. Fortunately we have lovely neighbours who let us carry buckets of water and use their shower, but it was a great moment when the taps started trickling again! This covered all of Christmas, but we disn’t let it stop us enjoying the holiday, and for the first time our newest youngest child put the baby Jesus in the crib.

Now it’s back to ‘green time’ – hence the change in the background. Most of us are back to work (one, thankfully, after a long enforced break), and I have just begun drafting a full-length poem, though perversely, or perhaps wishfully it is set at Beltane. It’s a bit like patchwork as I’m putting together fragments and haikus that I wrote last summer so as to think about transitions and endings and new possibilities.

I’m also, as you can see from the sidebar, joining in the River of Stones project. It’s a great thing for making sure you record and think about your observations every day, and I hope the habit will last even when the project ends. And I’m just about to update the Burnedthumb site. I’m not going to change the look or the structure, though, as the original design came in for a lot of compliments. Watch this space!

Green in the frost,
ripe seed pods of gladdon reveal
cobs of scarlet berries

All the bare shelves
white space and red tickets
Christmas got sold out

Five blackbird vigilantes.
Pigeons lined up on the roof
watch and wait.

On the street outside the tenement,
shovelled ice-blocks, cigarette ends.
and a broken can of McEwans.

Snow sculpted Trossachs
sharp white against the blue

Clear frosty night.
Sirius reflected
a soft blue blur in the river.

Wish I could have taken a picture of that!

West wind
rain in the chimney
hisses on hot coals

Grey lag geese calling in the dark before dawn