Monday 27 August 2007

Not musing but distracting

Well it's a bank holiday - and a lovely sunny one, too - but some of us are at our desks regardless. Sigh, groan. Actually, I don't mind that much - it's always good to feel that one is catching up with the in-tray on days when the house is quiet and there are no emails or phonecalls to distract.

Quite clearly I am not getting on with my work while I rattle off this latest 'musing', however. Although, given the dictionary definition of the word ('A product of contemplation; a thought'), neither this post nor most of my previous offerings properly qualifies. Perhaps the blog should revert to its former name. I changed it because I thought it might be offputting . . . but now I suspect that it was wholly accurate!

Here's another poem by David Britton. It was written to accompany a painting of the same name, which I hope soon to be displaying in the David Britton gallery on my main website.

Salcott Cattle Marshes

A herd of thoughts
Crosses the sky slowly.
Their mood and their demeanour
Are taken from below
From the long stretches
Without feature curve or glamour.

These salty bitten marshes
Where so few men go
Where the slow passage of cattle
Takes a long summer's day
For the traverse and the returning
—Here can a mind first settle
Then move on, unlearning
One by one, the soft illusions.
Here come strange airs and clearnesses
Strayed from another world.
No warmth in the judgments made
But the mind takes them, is saned
And fortified, sensing a hope
That must not yet be spoken
Beyond that fine blue line
Of the far horizon
Where the rigour ends, where the dooms are broken.

Some fascinating recent posts on the Mersea Wildlife site gives a much better account than I have done of the strange climate-swings we've been experiencing here (and some far better photos, too!)

Better get on with my work . . .

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