AWASH

Noah! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters . . .

It rains and rains...

On dark afternoons 

the garden is almost 

monochrome, wood conjures 

strange shapes in the half 

light at the shortest day of 

the year, when dusk comes 

before I've had my tea and 

biscuit, still replete from 

lunch. In the spring, lockdown 

was bearable for the sun 

shone. Now it is but a surprise 

glimmer through the grey 

clouds.

    Anyway, Sam the gardener has been, finished scraping the path and strimmed the banking above the pond again. I spend my time looking out of the drizzled windows at the rain and unwelcoming skies.

    There are some hopeful moments, seeing bulbs coming up, that the quince has decided to flower, that the Gardners' World Magazine has sent me seeds - chillies and rocket. Will sow the second, the first I tend to avoid (dire consequences).

And so it goes on, the path flooded, skeletal trees and the stream that dries up in the spring breaking the silence of the garden with its roar. Here and there a euphorbia casts a lighter shade and our plastic heron by the pond has lost its paint and is now a great white egret.

    So what to do? I go inside (or do not go out) and sit by the wood burner and read, sit in the chair where I was nursed as a baby. (Seems unlikely doesn't it!) 

    There is some hope - sent to take clear-out items to Age UK I came around the back of the building to be presented with this over the Sir John Barrow Monument on Hoad Hill.

Sunshine but, of course, rain also.

And there are still some colours - calendula, early quince flowers and the euphorbias heavy with raindrops.

    And when we do have a short burst of sunlight especially if it is back light, the garden glows.

Then, within a few minutes, it all changes. The wind rises, it becomes unnaturally dark and there is water cascading over the gutters.

    So I stay in most of the time, use the excuse that to trample the sodden garden would to do more damage and good and pen the odd poem -

BETWEEN

And in the daytime - I doze, inertia

grasping me after every meal, my eyes close.

The kitchen is a duvet of warm air

generated by our amber Aga.

I sit on the Marks and Spencer sofa - 

so troublesome when I seek to rise - 

my old joints and muscles complain, creak.

And a deep lethargy infuses me.

Each sinew relaxes, tension tapers.

I settle into the soft cushions, sigh, 

half here, half some other place,

some other plane. I almost dream,

peace, contentment just out of reach,

my breathing slows but I am still awake.

And I am in a silent interlude,

a vital space where nothing happens, 

a pause between the chiming of a clock,

a held breath, when the conversation dries,

what is written between the lines of prose,

verse, the practised pause in a comedian’s

delivery, the timing of the joke.

And all but peripheral perception 

is suspended. It is often now that 

lines of yet unwritten poetry come, 

but I am too somnolent to sit up,

take my pen and paper, write down the words

before I forget and they slip away, 

verse that might have been is lost - 

between.