Sunflowers and wilderness fringing the crops

 Bees and flying beasts are loving the strip of wilderness..and so am I!!

 Yellow is such a cheering colour

Sunflowers on the South Downs September 2013

Trees..

Poem

Joyce Kilmer was born in New Jersey in 1886. “Trees” is his best-known poem. It grew even more in popularity in the decades after Kilmer’s death, which occurred while he was fighting in World War I in 1917. Today, streets and schools across the country, a park in New York City and a 3,800 acre forest in North Carolina all bear Kilmer’s name.

Trees

By Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

There is something very magical about lying on your back and looking up into the branches of a tree. It somehow makes you feel whole and at peace...with perhaps Annie Lennox singing words of wisdom and loss in amongst the leaves.

I have found caterpillar's in my hair and robins in the kitchen but I quite like the idea of a robin bobbing along and whispering in my ear from the comfort of his nest entangled in my hair.

wishes

As my lovely mum used to say..'If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.'

At least I have the memory of when I was a beggar on horse back..

yawn...rubs eyes....

What to do with insomnia...!!!
Nothing so debilitating as spending a string of sleepless nights and having to do brain work during the day..I guess not being out with the scythe prevents me from chopping something off or decapitating a pooch.

At least the apple trees my old dad gave me a few years ago are bending with fruit this year. I know, I know I should pick a few off each cluster to improve the ones left..I'm letting a few wasps feast on the runty ones instead. We have a nice dialogue going on...

By now, a few days afters starting to write this post, I have with great care not to upset the yellow and black striped folk..picked off the rotting and half consumed apples..the trees are still so young and the fruit so heavy.

Wild flower patch gone native

Oh dear!!
The strip that was so recently denuded..and then burst into a delight of colour and species..is now head high with hogweed (hope it's not hemlock but I don't think it is) and all sorts..my scythe thinks I'm having a joke. It is impossible to work and tend all on one's own. Even the dogs think its funny to spend their time in a full out attack on all my gardening equipment....I don't know what the poor tyres of the wheel barrow have ever done to offend but it certainly gets the whole mouthful of teeth treatment every time I trundle near. And as for the rake well...I can only think that in some other life Scrabble was chased by one.
Hey Ho ! Maybe the garden gnomes will start helping out by moonlight..wouldn't that be nice.

Autumnal September is approaching..and today is damp and breezy. Sylvia and Helen put themselves to bed in the chook house just that little bit earlier last night. They had been plied with worming medicine mixed in with their morning lentil and pasta mash so maybe their tummies were full of gurgles rather than wriggly nemaotodes. Early to bed with a spot of quilting by moonlight was probably on their minds. Now that Jack Russell, Gata has returned to the chic streets of London with her mistress they know they can rest a little easier. Whilst she was visiting it wasn't only the wiley fox they had to keep an eye out for.
They have the three residents pooches number and will strut them into submission with a few discretely placed pecks..but Gata never bothered to read the rule book and thought that anything wearing feathers was fair game.

These pics taken last spring show just how much Sylvia's comb has developed. Now it is much grander.

August 2013 Look how much better her comb looks...a grown up chook she looks proper handsome.

Helen on the other hand is still a bit odd looking with a rather large swelling on her rear end..vet didn't know what it was but she has had it for some eighteen months and is still laying eggs. So it's not impacted eggs or she'd have succumbed by now. If she doesn't mind then neither do I..

'Food..food..Did you say food?'

Helen who must be coming up for four years old. Her two sister's were had by the fox but she's a survivor.

Coping with the Storm a tribute to the doctor and his patient Revised

Coping with the storm-A tribute to Dr JS and his patient 12^th November 2012

Superstorm heaves in, unstoppable,

Black Cyclops eye spitting spikes.

Hearts pound as adrenalin bangs

and info-mmercials

send the city to higher ground.

  

Is this real?

Will the clapperboard shout

'Cut. It's a wrap'?

In Rockaway, they crouch

behind closed doors and boarded windows.

Three day ago she heard she had the cancer.

Two days ago scans made weather maps

illuminating its path.

Yesterday she learned therapies won’t help.

No drugs or rays or knife.

Today is all.

  

Her doctor stands beside her as she lies quietly wired.

Monitors dawn chorus to the hiss of oxygen

and quietly padding feet. She tells him and he listens.

Her fears for others, worries for the battered homeless,

worries for their number, worries for the wake that icy foams

behind bitter swirling skirts.

The wages of sin is death

she angry whispers to her pillow.

The storm fades, flickering screens reveal

cars tossed like salad into a ribboned bowl of boardwalk.

Old man in baseball cap with a face

that’s used to smiling, now wet with tears.

Sighing she opens to express

all that has gone and cannot be the same.

She cannot be the same.

The void of her words

forms a space and they sit together, silent .

Pale morning light seeps

through sterile glass.

Smiling she weeps as memories

arc behind her eyes.

He takes her hand and feels it cool,

  

as she copes with the storm