And beauty came

It was with huge relief I saw a baby great tit make it out of the giant flower pot where its parents have woven the hugest complicated nest of moss and fluff.  It looked around bemused for around ten minutes before making it safely across to the refuge of the holly hedge.

And it was with surprise and pleasure I received two publications in the post today. Both feature poems of mine written a while ago, in one case three years ago, the second almost a decade. Poems coming into print is a fledging of a kind. They’ve left the nest of the house and desk and flown into the world although the short ones have already landed in a few different places.

For all that life seems linear, this reminds me of how time and writing are a complex weave of past and present moments – and future too, I believe, although we can’t know that yet.  Birds’ nests are as complicated as cathedrals – no wonder John Clare wrote so many poems inspired by them.  And connections through words are similarly mysterious.

The unexpected appearance of poems in the Long Islander takes me back to travels there with Geraldine Green, Caroline Carver and Penelope Shuttle and the hospitality of George Wallace and the link with Walt Whitman is echoed in a poem in Scintilla by my friend and colleague Graham Hartill. My own poems reference France and there’s a poem here by Kay Cotton who lives and writes in Normandie. And so on, a woven nest of memories and places.

On FB, South African poet Michelle McGrane posts a quotation by Sharon Olds and another message thread reminisces about Poetry Parnassus in 2012.

Other friends are having a difficult time with health and other challenges but this poem by Siegfried Sassoon never fails to remind me of how in spite of everything, even when there are no words, we can always sing.