Most feeders were empty this morning so the Goldfinches weren’t visiting. This seemed to make the Great Tits braver and three took it in turns to come for peanuts.
Walking up from the allotment this evening, the sun was setting behind Carn Brea.
Carn Brea Castle and the Bassett Monument
I found this poem very moving.
1 Today I have joined Bloggers for Peace. I like their philosophy.
Bloggers for Peace
2 I have long loved the poetry of Pablo Neruda and on the Bloggers for Peace blog found this gem from him that I hadn’t heard before. As one who loves cooking and words, I really appreciate this.
Let me give you one of my favourites, a really beautiful evocation of that lovely fresh fruit, the lemon. Read it slowly and you can taste the lemon as you do so.
A Lemon
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love’s
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree’s yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree’s planetariumDelicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation’s
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.
3 Tonight, in the wind and the rain, we have been to Truro to see the beautiful City of Lights Parade which warms the cold winter streets with the glow of enormous paper lanterns made of twisted willow and tissue paper. Here is a selection of the ones I was able to photograph. Click on any one to see the detail. The last one is the Tyrannosaurus Rex that I helped twist the willows for. It is made by Laura Frances Martin.
Tyrannosaurus Rex by Laura Frances Martin
1 “Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and speak a few sensible words” Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.
I’ve given you the song in Meme’s blog and here’s a poem that I love followed by a fine painting . Goethe’s own words are the sensible ones for today.
2 Don’t Go Far Off by Pablo Neruda
Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because —
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
3 This beautiful water colour by Oliver Bedford LRIBA, BWS, SGA 1902 – 1977 is of Pill Creek which I posted photos of yesterday.
Pill Creek by Oliver Bedford
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