The Big Butterfly Count
There ! A steak of white !
Let’s see…that’s one.
Now was it large, or small, or green-veined ?
Oh, what fun !
And there ! A brown of some sort –
Could be meadow, heath, or speckled wood –
But it’s clearly brown, I’d say,
If that’s much good…
A flash of red ! An admiral ? A tortoiseshell ?
What’s going on ?
Let’s take a closer look,
But no, it’s gone…
Wait, was that one the same
That I tallied over there,
As it circles round the garden ?
That’s not fair !
Willow Pattern
Two dancing birds,
Beaks apart, as if in song –
As they circle through the cloudy, milky sky.
One windsocked weeping willow,
Slanted, yet still strong,
And three folks on a hump-backed bridge nearby.
Could it be they’re fishing ?
Or waiting for the boat ?
Though it hasn’t got a sail – perhaps a punt ?
Upon the other bank
Is a house that looks afloat,
Sporting plenty of round shrubbery infront.
And over here, behind a zig-zag fence,
A squat pagoda,
That’s sheltered by a spreading ping-pong tree.
And round the edge are squares and scales,
And flowers for a coda,
A busyness of cobalt for our tea.
I stared and stared at China
On those Sunday afternoons,
When round at Gran’s, for tea and crumpets from the grate.
The disappearing cake
Revealed the timeless blue lagoons –
So very Eastern, yet so English, on a plate.
It is uncertain when the first examples of Willow Pattern appeared, although Wikipedia suggests they could have been produced by Spode in 1790. They are, of course, a classic example of cultural appropriation – and thank goodness they were ! Genuine Chinese porcelain at this time was very expensive, and modern pecksniffs would have seen to it that it remianed so, and that the hard-working families of Britain should be denied the beauty and broadened horizons that came with their roast beef and Yorkshires.
Meditation
Staring deep in wonder at an apple,
Or contemplating where to move in chess,
Shutting-out the thoughts with which we grapple –
Boring, boring, boring mindfulness !
Lazy-arses squatting in believe-ment,
While others get stuff done so you can pray –
But beauty’s in distraction and achievement,
And life’s too short for omming it away.
The A300 Relief Road
London Bridge has fallen down
As planners suffocate the town –
They cannot fathom what appeals
In Nonesuch House and waterwheels
They claim it’s not a chance to dream,
For reasons that evade me.
It’s just a means to cross a stream,
My fair forgotten lady.
The bridge that used to grace these banks
They gladly sold-off cheap to Yanks.
They have no care for what is lost,
Just that it’s done for cheapest cost.
And now the name evokes the tides
Of business bland and shady –
Just traffic jams and suicides,
My fair forgotten lady.
Dancing Gnats
Time is short, perhaps a month or two,
Since they were just an egg –
But now the gnats must boogaloo,
To swarm a wing and shake a leg.
They gather round a random patch of air
Just as the eve’ning falls –
And jink and jive until they pair,
Attending countless black-fly balls.
If love is on the cards for them tonight,
It leaves them out of breath –
Exhausted from their swaggered flight,
Too soon they’ve danced themselves to death.
Auto-Iconography
Why so many self-portraits ?
Vanity, or an honest appraisal ?
Why the endless tortured brow,
And wistful gaze of hazel ?
Are they honest, or distorted ?
Simply practice, or masterclass ?
Or is the cheapest model that funds allow
A looking-glass ?
Quad-Ops
Spiders have eight, and box-jellies twenty-four,
Scallops have hundreds, and dragonflies thousands,
And digital cameras even more !
But vertebrates make do with two,
Plus the odd ocelli peeping-through –
But only a couple of retinas –
A pair of light-bucket dishes –
Well, except for a few strange fishes !
And I don’t mean the four-eyed anableps,
Who see through both the water and air,
And focus the light through diff’rent steps
But onto the same old patch of cells,
That parallels the ones we chordates share.
No, I mean the brownsnout spookfish –
They may not look as swish as barreleyes,
Until we realise that here may be
The ancestor of a whole new tree
Of multi-looking vertebrates to arise –
That one day may just populate
The future Earth with their future eyes.
Adderbolts
OED first citation for dragonfly: 1626
Where were the darts of Galilee ?
And the damsels of the Rubicon ?
Was Runnymede so needle-free,
Or the Athens Woods of Oberon ?
So where are all the dragonflies ?
There’s not a word in tale or scroll –
The Greeks and Romans closed their eyes,
The monks and knights ignored them whole.
It took the new Enlightenment
To even notice them at last –
And then Romantics sought intent
In Nature bold and wild and vast –
Till Art Nouveau, which gave them wings
That keeps them soaring till this day –
As wardens of eternal springs,
Where dreamy Summers while away.
So where were the dragonflies of Hermes ?
Why no mention in the myths ?
Why did Freya not claim these flurries,
Crafted by the finest smiths ?
Perhaps the Bible’s just too dry
For water-sprites as story-tools,
But rainy Europe shouldn’t shy
To catch the eye with flying jewels.
Transforming in among the reeds,
A lit’ral metamorphosis –
The fey-folk surely rode these steeds ?,
Yet Brigid never knew such bliss.
Shouldn’t the Devil have taken hold ?,
Or gargoyles, say, or heraldry ?
Yet where were the dragonflies of old ?,
Who chirped and danced for nobody.
‘Adderbolt’ is the only earlier name for them that I couold find, and this only dates from 1483, according to the OED, and ‘Devil’s darning needle’ is only from 1809.
And finally, the image below is from a poster which looks reminiscent of others advertising the various Art Nouveau exhibitions at places like the V&A.cHowever, I cannot find out anything else about this particular image, and if it is even an original by William Morris. I hope it isn’t AI…
Jethro’s Toll
(In reply to Farm On The Freeway)
I’m not a fan of the big road pushing through the valley floor –
It should have been a high-speed rail line.
But just what have you got against a chip-set factory ?
And the jobs that get to work while you just whine.
I guess the loss of green and habitat’s a shame, for sure,
But your farm was pretty monocultured too –
The world needs fewer humans, as I hope you would agree,
And a lot less of consumption, making-do.
We haven’t all got daddies leaving farms to us, and more,
No, we many have us very little leeway.
So take your million-dollars and your nimby don’t-tax-me –
Cos this ain’t your farm no more – now it’s our freeway.
Sacré Rouge
The bathtub killer – time for a pardon ?
Ah, now there’s a thorny one…
She’s a murderess, and a proud one,
And a test for the historian:
We may hate the very notion
Of the capital penalty –
But when a despot’s above the law,
Then is there another remedy ?
We’d much prefer to see him tried
For all the bloodshed he’d provoked –
And yet, she also was a part of that mob
That he had stoked.
Though actually, her action
Didn’t stop the Terror in its tracks,
And made a martyr from a monster,
As they ramped-up their attacks.
The fact that the ancient regime
Was such a horror is no excuse,
Nor that the new lot were the same –
It’s all a cycle of abuse.
Of course, we were not there, in the thick,
So would we be so wise ?
But today, at least, we can stand by the law, and by life –
And not eyes-for-eyes.
Rhyming Couplets 