Please note : because of the volume of work coming in I'm not able to let you know that your work has been posted, so do keep looking at the Blog and the Facebook page.
Work so far has been varied and of high quality so most of it
has been or will be posted.
Goldfinch - Tom Langlands
Crumbs.
An argument of sparrows
Rages across a busy road
Traffic grinds to a halt -
Bewildered by such towering fury -
Avoids the fragile fighting mass,
Minds bereft of all except war;
Bread lies abandoned in the gutter.
Anne Micklethwaite.
Pillage.
A downy bird so small
Amidst the willows tall
With loud incessant call,
Chit chit, chit chit.
Four golden reeds stretch high
Eggs in the nest now lie
With feathers warm and dry,
Chit chit, chit chit.
Her eggs are safe from cat
No danger from a rat
She chases high a gnat
Chit chit, chit chit.
The stripy cuckoo sly
Within the nest does lie
One egg and flits, goodbye
Cuckoo, cuckoo.
The cuckoo’s job now over
Take’s wing – she is a rover,
Life for her is clover
Cuckoo, cuckoo.
The warbler chicks are killed
The cuckoo chick is filled
Chit chit, chit chit,
Cuckoo, cuckold.
Thelma Hancock
Pears with giraffe weevil - Hazel Lowther
Epiphany
I was born a naturalist and my reading from an early age reflected this. In my teens and twenties books on taxonomy and identification, on Neo-Darwinism and the Gaia hypothesis filled my bookshelves. Steven Jay Gould was all the rage. It wasn’t until my late forties that I came across The Emperor’s New Mind by the mathematician Roger Penrose. He showed me how the quantum, the very small scale world, was related to the macro world which we inhabit and also to the very large scale world, the cosmos. A door was opened and has remained so. I had discovered a new way of thinking.
It was only when I was reflecting on epiphanies that I suddenly remembered a book from my childhood, a book from my parents’ library. I think it was titled The Stars in Their Courses (not the collection of essays by Isaac Asimov). What fascinated me was not so much the text but the rather fuzzy black and white photographs of the Andromeda Galaxy. I would stare in wonder at the images trying to get my head round the vast numbers of stars and the meaning of space. At the time the book was written it was thought that was all there was to the Universe. The billions of galaxies now revealed by the Hubble telescope would have been unimaginable. Perhaps I was primed by this early reading to be receptive to Penrose’s great book and his others which followed it. They opened my mind to a holistic view of the cosmos as a bottom-up, self organizing system, a system investigated by the most complex structure so far known-the human mind.
Leonie Ewing
(Love Prompt)
An appalling piece of doggerel for October online.
When winter turns to springtime,
Then the hedgehogs turn to love,
Grunting, they search the hedgerows
leaves, daisy, rose, foxglove.
As daylight stretches longer,
Soft warmth of evening balm,
These hedge pigs chase each other
Disturbing sunsets calm.
Man does enjoy the hedgehog,
Its waddling, bristly flair,
He wonders how it mates, and,
The answers, 'with great care’.
Thelma Hancock
(Absence Prompt)
Absence
The time has come
the music played
and the light is not so bright,
the sounds that were her world
have vanished like the night,
and the days are quiet and long
Stillness reigns
like shrouded mist
chatter and laughter left,
birds are soaring overhead
leaving abandoned nests,
and life has lost it's song.
By Eleanor Chesters
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