I collected some prettiness from our garden to make a small bouquet to take to our Dear friend, Ti. In it there was a branch of Crinodendron Hookerarium, some Clematis Montana, two kinds of Pittosporum, some beautifully scented Choisya Ternata Apple Blossom and a few Spanish Bluebells.
In their developing woodland a few English Bluebells have arrived. What a joy!
Kaja loved walking there with us, almost disappearing in the long grass.
Kaja
As I am just finishing writing this evening, Radio 4 has just told me that it is International Dylan Thomas Day. I love the works of this amazing poet who died far too young. If you put his name into my search bar you will find many posts with his poems. His book, “Deaths and Entrances” was my first introduction to his poems, bought for me when I was about 11 years old.
‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ touched me then and still does. It is not as harsh as it sounds. He seems to be asking why one death should be mourned more than another. We are all of equal value.
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
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