Flea Markets and Cicada
Beautiful day in Brighton, 20c, and I got busy deadheading and tidying in my front garden. A pleasant woman with a dog stopped to chat, but we were interrupted by a maniac with a battered face trying to cadge money, exit pleasant woman. Bah.
Met Sophie and Andros and bairns by the station and we headed off to the flea market. It is difficult to hear what those tiny critters are selling you sometimes. Anyway, after mooching about here we went back to the sea, and Electra and Christof went on the bungee trampoline thing, and after this we had lunch in the Mock Turtle again. Lots of laughing here, and a really fun time with them. We had an excellent weekend together.
Then off to the cybercafe just up the street from me to discover that the first response from my recent campaign of sending some manuscripts out: an acceptance from a small poetry magazine called Other Poetry. The poem (below) was written in Greece and I had my late friend Tim Gallagher in mind when I was writing it.
Anton and Anna back from Spain, and I lurked with them in the evening. Good laugh chatting and eating Anton's own excellent pasta recipe. They also gave me a pair of reassuringly breast-like Spanish cheeses and a book of old Guernsey recipes.
Cicada
Another Greek island, the gravestones
Dignified with thyme, dried flowers
And framed photos.
The cicadas are everywhere.
Plato, I remember, wrote they were the souls of poets.
Then I spot one
Its vivid wings retracted
Into its cacophonous carapace
Like a squat little Cavafis
Perhaps, a drab little Blake,
Or another who is unnamed
An exoskeletoned visionary
The author of a long-burnt library
Shrilling somewhere on an empty island,
From a cypress tree.
Beautiful day in Brighton, 20c, and I got busy deadheading and tidying in my front garden. A pleasant woman with a dog stopped to chat, but we were interrupted by a maniac with a battered face trying to cadge money, exit pleasant woman. Bah.
Met Sophie and Andros and bairns by the station and we headed off to the flea market. It is difficult to hear what those tiny critters are selling you sometimes. Anyway, after mooching about here we went back to the sea, and Electra and Christof went on the bungee trampoline thing, and after this we had lunch in the Mock Turtle again. Lots of laughing here, and a really fun time with them. We had an excellent weekend together.
Then off to the cybercafe just up the street from me to discover that the first response from my recent campaign of sending some manuscripts out: an acceptance from a small poetry magazine called Other Poetry. The poem (below) was written in Greece and I had my late friend Tim Gallagher in mind when I was writing it.
Anton and Anna back from Spain, and I lurked with them in the evening. Good laugh chatting and eating Anton's own excellent pasta recipe. They also gave me a pair of reassuringly breast-like Spanish cheeses and a book of old Guernsey recipes.
Cicada
Another Greek island, the gravestones
Dignified with thyme, dried flowers
And framed photos.
The cicadas are everywhere.
Plato, I remember, wrote they were the souls of poets.
Then I spot one
Its vivid wings retracted
Into its cacophonous carapace
Like a squat little Cavafis
Perhaps, a drab little Blake,
Or another who is unnamed
An exoskeletoned visionary
The author of a long-burnt library
Shrilling somewhere on an empty island,
From a cypress tree.
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