54 How to write when there is

nothing & everything to say

Hello my friends and thank you for being here, reading.

I’ve been quiet and reflective the last little while: it’s partly the après-book torpor, now that I’ve sent in Kitchen, Garden, Orchard, World, the vegan cookbook that’s so occupied me for nearly a decade; it’s partly the heat per se, not to mention the associated climate change and my/our helplessness to do anything other than be aware of our individual small part in that; and it’s partly because I have so much to say I don’t know which thread to pick up.

And then there are the other big issues, like Gaza and genocide; like animal welfare (and a promised blog on why our healthy dog is vegan); like the madness of the human world we live in.

Like why I believe that shifting our focus from the anthropocentric to the ecocentric is probably our only hope for a sane future.

I also have in mind a blog on writing for the FIRE IN THE HEAD section with an invitation to you that I want to include.

But today, I won’t write about any of these. I’ll post (in the hopes that you find it of interest) my little diary poems/prose-poems from the last few days; these are a way of ensuring I write something, however small, in the face of the void(!).*

*

July 10th
Thick cloud, then hot.
Five miles and no other car.
First wheat’s in: golden windrows
waiting to be baled.

On the hill, cows
bellow for their lost babies –
stolen so that we can
drink their milk.


July 11th
Heatwave. Huelgoat. Heaven-blue lake.
Water lily leaves; spikes of new flowers.
The one day that flying ants take to the air.
Young swallows skim the meniscus, perfecting
their hunting skills. Squadron of screaming adolescent
swifts. Damselflies. Tiny breeze fingers the lake
into ruffles, an easterly, hot from the Urals.
One clear stripe, like an erasure.

What right do we have not to be happy here
with everything we need: shelter, food and water,
not to mention absence of war, and too
friendship, meaning, love?


July 12th
35 degrees; my friend tells me it’s 53.6º on her doorstep.
I wanted this when I wanted to move further south;
older now, I’m not so excited by heat, more aware
of climate change, water stress, drought.

As I watch, just feet away a young hen blackbird
bathes in the dog bowl, clatters her wings. Quietly
I thank her and the young thrushes for keeping
our veg plot free of gastropods.

Too hot. Indoors, I chop marrow and rhubarb for pickle
and chutney; boil vinegar and spices; try not to think
of our heating-up planet, of Gaza, of the parched goats
up the lane.

Later, the last pale roses fade as light
seeps away, uncolours the sky.


July 13th
Canicule/heatwave.

All day, part of the blue, the young buzzards mew.
Every vole in Finistère has found and is eating
our garden, even the onions. A hornet
brushes my face; bumble bee investigates my dress.
The hen blackbird can’t help announcing her thievery
in the raspberries; comes back to the dog’s water bowl.

‘Only this. But this.’


*

(*Sometimes I offer prose poem workshops; see my website Fire in the Head for forthcoming possibilities. I also have a book that is mainly prose poetry: Bardo.)

As you know, I love your comments, your likes, your shares. Till soon, with love.