National Poetry Day: Light

Today is National Poetry Day.

Poetry is the fine dining of literature. We spend most of our days tossing together the everyday pasta of prose, finding a few quick metaphors in the fridge and splashing in a dash of humour to add to the flavour.

But sometimes we want to spend the extra time to make a meal to linger over. We pick out the best of our rare similes and assemble them artfully, paying careful attention to rhyme and metre. The restrictions force us to pare down to the essentials, letting the flavour of the ingredients speak for themselves. The intention is not just to sate the appetite for words, but to stroke the senses and stir the imagination. To create an occasion. A poem.

I'm afraid my blog is not a fine dining establishment this evening. I tried to put some ingredients together, but they somehow failed to produce anything worth keeping. Fortunately others are better poetry chefs than I am, and they have left a menu. You can enjoy the free National Poetry Day book here, with poems new and old on the theme of light.

Bon appetit!

Comments

I have a piano!!!

OK, maybe we should have bought a stand! But who cares if it doesn't have the most aesthetically pleasing setting - it's great to have something to play on again. My most loving and wonderful husband had obviously picked up a few signs that I was missing my piano (no, I wasn't hinting that badly!) and a few days ago said, "I was just in the guitar shop and they had a big sale on keyboards - do you want to take a look?" So we went and browsed around a bit, and he firmly dragged me away from the $1000+ models and made me look at some more reasonable ones, and after some discussion we went for this little Casio. It's more portable than the type with a built-in stand, which was a big consideration when we know we're moving in less than 2 years and I had to leave my old one behind for precisely that reason. It's got weighted keys so the touch is good; the sound could be better but it renders Bach quite prettily even if not really coping with Rachm...

Working on sunshine

Freeeee electricity! No, seriously. This guy came and knocked on the door one day, and I don't usually pay any more attention to random strangers trying to sell me something at the door than you probably do, but I guess he must have said "free" enough times to penetrate my consciousness, so I found myself agreeing to have someone check our house's suitability for solar panels. And another guy turned up, and measured; and another one, and we signed; and a few more, and put up scaffolding and panels and meter boxes and cable; and suddenly, if we're careful, we can avoid paying for any electricity during daylight hours, because it's all generated right up there above our heads. Of course, we have the British government to thank for this, which probably means we're paying for it somewhere along the line. The Department for Energy and Climate Change (presumably it's actually against climate change rather than for it, although you never know) has...

It isn't that important to me...

When we went sailing a few weeks ago, I mentioned to one of the club members that I had tried sailing a topper as a teenager, and really enjoyed it. He asked: "Why haven't you done any sailing since then?" Well. On the face of it, that's a perfectly reasonable question. On the other hand, why don't we do all these many things that we would probably enjoy if we did them? Because our weekends are already full. Because we don't know anyone else who does it. Because it will cost money. Because we're afraid it will take up all our time. Because the kids don't want to. Because, quite frankly, it isn't that important to us. Which isn't really something you can say to someone who's been sailing for longer than you've been alive. But that's pretty much what it comes down to. That brief conversation, and a similar one with a tennis instructor, served to point out the difference between those who are "in" an ...

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog