Our walk ‘around the back’ along a short stretch of the Flat Lode Trail was rain free today. It was wild and windy and quite hard work but very satisfying. I was delighted to find Cow Parsley as our niece-in-law, a brilliant poet, recently shared the following poem about Queen Anne’s Lace, the much prettier name used by Americans.
Queen Anne’s lace grows dark
and brittle as a backdrop by fall.
She stays the night just as quiet as before,
with a heart hard as timber by sunrise
still delicate and breakable and
by some fortune still ignored
by the creatures with limbs that might call
out her name and
snap her by the stem for a memorial.
She will not break beneath the endless rains
the frost of the morning or
the bleak quiet of the cul-de-sac,
the shades of grey you could call out by name,
the warm bodies which brush blithe
against the lines of her form.
Queen Anne’s lace sleeps with
her fingers to the sky
and her body deformed in glory,
patient for the warm rains of late winter
and the sun like a cold flashlight
in the hazy sky which will beckon her
to wake once more and
glimmer by the highway
in hindsight
restored.
By Kari Bijou
We call this walk ’round the back’ as it goes up behind our house which can be seen, just, in the next zoomed in photo. Ours is the yellow painted one (the paint is called Cornish Cream) with a window in the attic, on the right of the two Victorian semis.
Our house
O
