CONJURING FOUNTAINS

 

FORAY

FALLOW AND FALL

MICORRHIZAL WHISPERS

POST-SOLSTICE DAYS

THE SPARK OF SUDDENLY

SPRING OVERNIGHT

TREES ALIGN

THE JOY OF SCAMPER

Suddenly startling, yet continuous

For you with the joy of scamper,

You skitter through underbrush

Damp with February.

To me you are lift in a lick of light

Travelling the trunk of an oak,

A denser shadow, furred furrow.

Tree knows your transient tickle,

Stays focused beyond your claw clicks

On her slow hidden

Fostering of foliage,

The suckling of Spring.

FIRE & FALL

WOODWAYS

ASH-SHE - on the felling of the Beloved Ash

They came without fanfare
As Autumn gathered her gold
In keys and coppery carillons
Of trees untold.

You stood, Beloved Ash,
Fraxinus fair,
Facing unfazed their saw teeth
Till no tree was there.

When stillness swallowed blade-hum
In your shadowy wake,
The sawdust sprinkled silence
For your soundless sake.

This space still throws your shape
Above your severed root.
The elder that you sheltered
Conjures sap and shoot

In memory of your majesty,
Spring sprays unborn.
Birds circle your absence,
Wings on paths well worn.

Your stump now melts its heart
In toadstool and in moss,
Minting from Winter's promise
Wisdom, truth and loss.

[Tribute to the much-beloved Ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior) at the end of my garden, felled earlier this month at the request of another who lived in its sacred shadow but saw only leaf litter and blocked sky. Felt its going so deeply, it's taken me this long to say what I wanted to say in tribute to such a beautiful old friend. I could never do it full justice. RIP the Beloved Ash.]

WHAT NOW?

Bell glows

Now. Now and now.

No emphasis or urgency.

Only the rift sliced through

The tolling

By the frisking wind.

What now?

This now,

Between breath

And silence.

Moss-lipped wince of boughs

Present beneath

This butterscotch light

Purring with sunfall.

MILK MAIDS AND BELLS OF BLUE

MILK MAIDS - the white version of HYACINTHOIDES HISPANICA, the SPANISH BLUEBELL

When I was little, I used to love finding white bluebells.

Bit of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean!

Now they're considered relatively rare. The native kind, at least, though in my childhood in South Yorkshire in the Sixties, I remember them as a treasure we would come across in some shady spot under the trees every year.

MILK MAIDS - WHITE BLUEBELLS IN WICKERSLEY WOOD

"Milk Maids," we called them in our family. A name passed down to me from my maternal grandfather who loved to ramble through the hilly landscape on the edges of the Peak District from his home in Norton Lees in Sheffield. For this quiet man, as for me, the realm of nature was a magical escape from the mundane, full of secret delights and familiar faces.

Milk Maids. The name made me think of nursery rhymes, bucolic bliss, young lasses carrying yokes across their shoulders, milk churns bumping at their hips as they went skipping through meadows knee deep in spring lambs gambolling and vaulting to celebrate a sunshiny May Day just like today.

Milky Maidens! My imagination melted them into the backdrop of countryside joy I discovered every time I stepped out from my back door in the Dearne Valley.

The invasive Spanish bluebell (Hyacinthoides hispanica), often cultivated in gardens, commonly has white individuals dancing among the throngs of cerulean and lapis lazuli bells. Our UK native bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) on the other hand, admit fewer of these albino beauties to their flock.

I may know more facts about bluebells now than I did back in the day as a little girl just beginning to meet the wonders of the world.

But nothing can replace that early exhilaration of meeting the Milk Maids in the shadowy vales of home.

I feel especially blessed this year. I have a bevy of Milk Maids growing under my Cherry Tree.

Yes, they're Spanish, not native.

They are exotic Iberian Milk Maids who whisper in continental tongues.

But they make my heart smile anyway.

BELLS BOTH WHITE AND BLUE, WICKERSLEY WOOD, SOUTH YORKSHIRE

TREE GONE SOLO

Here's a poem for all you lovely readers inspired by a recent walk around my local Wickersley Wood on the outskirts of Rotherham. There's a particular tree there that grows apart from the main body of woodland. Readers of my poems and stories will understand how deeply my imagination's affected by the natural world around me. Here's another fragment for you of my lifelong lovesong to the beautiful landscapes of my native Yorkshire. 

Little Birchover

I feel you teasing back the cuticle of the wood

Crafting this clearing from nip and nod

We nickname it other than known on the map

As our secret local upland Peak

Right here where exhaustion still can stalk

I hear you in throats of swithering birds

Blackbird plumping up leaves under oaks

With harrumphing tuts

Where acorns hurt soles with unyielding treen

Scuttle through beech masts and lichens velveteen

I see you drizzling sunbeams over autumn fields

Flattened by bonfires and the winter's heels

Firedamp flickers in the stars smudged frost

Planets glimmering out and over

While the moon's fragile crust burns ochre

I smell your lit lamp of cadmium and glass

Tallow wax mournful as the twilight lasts

Even the squirrel is dreyed and tucked

But your comfort salts my spirit's ache

As rays flatline then vanish in earth's dimpled lake

I taste you as love in the air's liquid kiss

Soothing my temples with powder-soft peace

The path from the wood runs its fingers through me

But you, guest and gatherer, map and plumb

Lead me home in your arms with your whisper: Come!

Nuthatch

Feeling very privileged to have been watching two young great spotted woodpeckers, a family of long tailed tits and a nuthatch who usually lives in the local woods, all coming to my garden feeders today. The unexpected nuthatch visit inspired me tonight as I sit waiting for twilight to fall, when the family of hedgehogs who are now dropping by my garden each evening arrive with their noisy but captivating shenanigans...


You scramble, head down,
Holding the world mirrored
Invert under scuttling feet


Clambering, chestnut breast to bark
Smoke blue wings a caped swoop,
Aerobat, probing and melting
On a tittering tightrope


Patient bill, plastering a pinhole persistent
To fend marauder starlings away from your babies.


D-I-Y dodger, framing the woodpecker brother's old pad
For your rental, yet wholly inhabiting
Your acorn carpeted aerodrome.


Scurrying sideways, dissolving
Through the beech canopy
Skimming your liquid voice's pebble
To skip over the rippling pool of dusk


High over hedgehogs chuckling
Through beech mast and littered leaves
On their way to a festival of surreptitious snorting
Under the bone-blanched moon
And the shrill verdict of owls