Raucous Blackcaps on Madiera

I could not understand to begin with why the blackcaps outside my hotel balcony were making such a racket. It turned out that the bottlebrush shrub that they liked to hide in had been infiltrated by some wild canaries. The blackcaps were defending their territory whilst the canaries were partaking of the nectar from the many blooms on the shrub,

Take me Back to The Mountain

Take me back to the Mountains

Upon a rising fell it lay

With mist ivied round tree and rock,

A beck of swirling water at play

Slipping, sliding, glistening as a crack

Of silver. Curlew stalked upon the clay

Whilst I watched the green, green blue

Of earth and sky and took stock.

Its whiteness mirrored in the water’s edge

A purity and known in death,

Yet of life. Still it lays as of a wedge

Keeping open the door, no knife

Into the memory of those who went before,

Who stand on turf, sedge and ledge.

Dry, white, a mask of death

Amidst the life-sprung lambs

And flowering breath of spring-torn fools.

A thing apart, yet from within

Not to be mistaken for rock or branch

Its stillness gives a life of its own.

Mocking as it lies, a blanched smile

Within a wrecked home

Clear pure air whistles through those sockets

Eyelets upon the woven frame.

Greening cranium of a nobility often tested,

Lingering now amidst sweet grasses and sedges

Mouthing that final, fatal message:

Take me back to the mountains.

Dave Urmston c 2016

Ageing

Ageing

I thought that ‘old’ would creep up on me

But no, it came all of a sudden.

Not so much the physical things we

Are susceptible to when driven

To distraction by our aches and pain

But the forgetting and the losing

Of our things, that becomes the true bane

Of life as we dodder through, knowing

That the simple things are no longer

So straightforward, but things that challenge

Us as never before. The stranger

Things we find are maybe not so strange.

We cast about for meanings and sense

Knowing less as we are believing

More. Things become stressful, pained and tense

As we prepare to take our leaving.