The Watchers.

We watch the birds and the birds watch us.

They are harvesting the maize here. The plants have ripened for months and are dry sentinels guarding the hard yellow cobs that will go for bio fuel or animal feed. Enormous harvesters are shredding the stalks and a glistening stream of grain pours into the following truck. And watching from the orchards are the chaffinches.

A few have been here all summer, but now there are hundreds and they are following the harvest. What do these huge roaring machines look like to these little birds? How did they learn that the rumble and diesel smell means grain to eat as they pick their way through the chaff with the newly arrived winter migrants?

The storks and the buzzards recognise the ploughs that turn over insects and voles to eat in the summer and my sparrows recognise the bread board being shaken each morning over the bird table to scatter crumbs for them.

We think we are the observant ones, but really we are just one set of eyes amongst many watching all around us!

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The Lengthening Shadows

The year is turning and the shadows creep up the wall.

These saplings pattern a chapel in the forest nearby. This chapel is all that remains of a village that was never rebuilt after plague and invasion wiped out the inhabitants. A local history buff has carved its named on a picnic bench, where hikers might pause for a moment to wonder who lived here as they chomp down their energy bars amongst the quiet of the trees.

Only the name and shadows remain.

 

 

Three quarters of the flying insects are gone.

This article from the Guardian newspaper explains the terrifying decline in insects that is happening in Europe. I heard about it on a radio programme as I was rushing out to work and like so much bad news, I jus hoped it wasn’t true.

Unfortunately it is true and I know it . 

When I would drive home in dusk twenty years ago, the windscreen of my car would be covered in dead insects. Driving down a country lane in the summer was to push through all manner of bugs and butterflies, but now the glass is hardly dirty.

The air is empty. We have trimmed all the hedges and the field edges, we have patioed our gardens and insecticided every crop and plant that we grow. We have tidied up everywhere and now there is virtually no where left for a bug to feed, which means no bugs for the birds to feed on, no birds for the mammals to catch and so on up the food chain.

I don’t want to know this. It is too depressing, but that won’t stop it being true.

So in the spirit of the saying that it is better to light a candle in the night, that to curse the darkness, I will not be tidying my garden this weekend. I shall leave every over grown plant and tatty seedhead; every untrimmed corner of rank grass and every heap of uncollected leaves in the hope that a few hard pressed insects will find a home there and survive for just a little longer.

Here’s to not gardening in the dark!

https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/21/insects-giant-ecosystem-collapsing-human-activity-catastrophe

“…later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease.”

Keats “ Ode to  Autumn” must have been inspired by a day like today. Sunshine has spun out so many  flowers, that it seems impossible cold weather will ever destroy them and frost crisp them: but it will.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease…

 

A Day to Fly.

Lying on my back watching the sky, I saw long white filaments appear from high up and drift on by in the clear blue air. All the swifts, swallows and even martins have long gone, but some thing was taking advantage of the autumn sunshine : spiders.

Spiders,  like this garden beauty, stick their fat abdomens up to the sky from trees and twigs and spin out long threads of gossamer, which contain hundreds of tiny spiders, and cast them adrift to the wind.  The gossamer can carry the young spiders for hundreds of miles away across land or water . They can skim on salt or fresh water and Darwin himself found them on his ship miles from any land.

Many will perish, but many will survive and colonise huge distances.

What daring – what freedom.  What a day to fly!

 

The fungi replies (to Cathy’s real country garden)

PETER FRANKIS WRITES

The fungi replies (to Cathy’s real country garden)

 

I don’t know if they are artists’ pallets,
or horses’ hooves
it used to matter, but it doesn’t now.
They grew slowly, in dark arcs
and could support a book.
Their lips are white and moist
But speak another language.

 

Of course my clammy palms & veiny
glow are creepy mon cherie.
But, for a moment stay,
a little closer s’il vous plaît
To anyone who’ll listen
I whisper my refrain.

Hallelujah I sing of rot

and in the cell-by-cell undoing, life lives again
the forest blooms, the garden beds renew.
Here’s my truth, my mystery:
nothing is that hasn’t been
nothing is new
or ever lost.

 

 

In “poetry
Sum(mer) sonnet
In “poetry”
Cry woman workshop
In “poetry”
October 9, 2017
peterfrankiswrites
fungigardenshumourpoemrenewalrot
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2 thoughts on “The fungi replies (to Cathy’s real country garden)”

 

Worthy of Andrew Marvel! ⏳

For Peter Frankis.

I don’t know if they are artists’ pallets,

or horses’ hooves

it used to matter, but it doesn’t now.

They grew slowly, in dark arcs

and could support a book .

Their lips are white and moist

But speak another language.

Tutti Frutti Autumn

That’s it!