Advantage

It spreads everywhere like a green spume

Growth has the advantage in the moment
Carpeting the feet of the trees in velvet
Blanketing undergrowth in thick verdant mist
Naught may assuage its escalation
Nor hinder its advance across the order
We tirelessly wrought in labour before the zenith
Wimbledon may have its manicured courts
But we have the assizes of nature itself
And in earnest she pronounces judgement
Growth is king; long live the summer

Dreams of Avarice 

The world though blunt instrument
Bludgeons careful hammer blows
Of rhetoric and needful reminders
But it is not this day that sends
A summer mist to layer and wreathe
Around the fallen dreams of avarice  
That I must navigate a path through

Midges

For labours in the north

The days run ever shorter
Into the scything bites
Of the smallest monsters
A plague on summer’s land
They shall ever be so
Till the cold takes notoriety
And renders them powerless
So we may begin the harvest
In painless autumn peace

Fissure

 

Can you hear rain grumbling

As it falls between fissures
That appeared in anger
When the heat at last opened
A way into the closed earth
That lies deep underneath our feet

Some is taken high by the trees

To the verdant roof of the world
And sent back to the sky
Some by the swollen rivers
That arc in song to the seas
Emissaries of hope and care

A small part filters downward

Through the detritus of millennia
To join pools of saccharine water
From the long rainfall of prehistory
That caresses the bones of dinosaurs
And remembers a much better world

Ascendancy is Queen

Sweet briefness of sacred days

Of warmth and succour to all
A summer queen was ascendant
Yet so soon she withdraws
Fades away trailing golden robes
As we reach the zenith of light
So passes the longest daytime
Into the darks embrace again
A new power struggles begins
To a long off December nadir

Predatory

Soft speak the dreamy sounds of dusk

Rolling down hills over new mown grass
Over the now decaying blooms of the day

 In watchfulness of predatory intent

Rabbits eat lawns in subtle vigilance
Glimpsing into the darkening corners
 

So take peace and ease at the pass of day

All this will rise again on the morrow
But now night is come and watchers emerge

The Hand of Man

Timeless ancient giants given form 50 million years ago
Cetaceans are the gentle voyagers of the deep blue oceans
Sleek and streamlined pedigree; the greyhounds of the sea
A giant Fin baleen whale surfaces from this veiled deep
Into a blood-spattered abattoir of human ,hateful greed
70 tons of sentient grace destroyed by monsters from land
I have not powerful words, nor influential outrage to bring
For wrongly I imprint my human empathies upon whales
But in truth why would they wish anything from humanity
Better they look to the stars for aid; little will come from Earth

Iceland has resumed its commercial hunting of fin whales after a two-year suspension by landing the first of an expected 180 whales in Hvalfjördur. The first kill prompted protests from environment and animal welfare groups that the hunt is "cruel and unnecessary". Undercover pictures taken aboard the Hvalur 8 by Greenpeace show the harpooned whale being cut up for meat that is likely to be exported to Japan. Fin whales are the second largest animal on earth after the blue whale and are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list of threatened species.

 

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) condemned the Icelandic whaler Kristján Loftsson who has resumed fin whaling after a two year break. "It is a very sad day seeing these images and knowing that this endangered animal has suffered a cruel death, only to be cut up for meat that nobody needs," said Robbie Marsland, UK director of IFAW. "It is time that this dying industry was ended.” Some of the meat has ended up in dog food products in Japan. “We urge the Icelandic government to listen to its whale watching and tourism operators and many members of the public both within and outside Iceland and recognise that slaughtering whales is uneconomic as well as inhumane. Whale watching brings greater benefit to coastal communities."
 

Iceland cancelled fin whale hunts in 2011 and 2012 partly because Japan, the largest market, was suffering an economic downturn after of the devastating tsunami in March 2011. Seven fin whales were killed in Iceland's waters in 2006, 125 in 2009 and 148 in 2010. Loftsson's company Hvalur plans to hunt up to 180 fin whales in the 2013 season.
 

"Whaling is brutal and belongs to a bygone era not the 21st century," said John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK. "It is deeply regrettable that a single Icelandic whaler backed by the government is undermining the global ban on commercial whaling which is there to secure the future of the world's whales."

Fin-whale-being-landed-at-Hvalfjordur-whaling-station-c-EIA
 

 

I took this photo of a frog in the garden but it blurred because the frog moved and the camera couldn't focus fast enough. I noticed the strange markings on its back and blew them up and added some colouring – spooky or what?

It’s like the film ‘The Fly’ only with a Frog

Below is the adjusted picture and the original

7900 odd Miles

Unless you move the moon closer to Mars

You cannot ever hold back all the waves
Cannot separate all the shells on the shore
Cannot stop 7900 miles of spherical balance
So hear the sound of the ocean and remember
The seven veils of sunlight* will not falter yet
Another billion years of summer wonders await
So we still cross over the long arid miles to sea
For revelation never came sweeter; as beside water

Heron in flight

Chenille Wings

I thought of you as I lay there still and alone and you came

You enclosed me in the night like a coverlet of butterflies
My honeyed trail of tears soothed by soft, velvet kisses
From delicate chenille wings beating in time to my heart

Anaglyph

Perhaps life itself is seen in stereo as an anaglyph*

The 3D world is here and we sit betwixt colours
A different eye view for the soul and for the heart

Green for the soul that welcomes such contentment

Soothed by each new day in a safe place to exist
Or...
Red for the heart that aches in commensurate sorrow
At each new piece of ill news that threatens peace

We here get to choose which lens we should like to use
In this secure state so we would wish the same for you
Even if we know that life for some is truly unbearable
 

Today I will gaze from red in the hope you see green

Just for a day tumble into my world and live in peace
Even if the rose tint of reality returns again to haunt

*A three-dimensional visual effect created by dyeing each of two images a different colour, usually red and green, and then viewing them through complementary-coloured filters, one over each eye

A new study out show we can do everything better up north - even dying. It's a bit worrying

Sweet Water

One-sided heretic of gentle misfortune perhaps

But never as contented as when the rain falls fast
On a blessed morning imagining nonchalant cares
Angels may one day come to take me away to bliss
But while the sun shines and such sweet water falls
I could not imagine a more wondrous place to exist

Collective Embrace

One crescent moon; nascent and vital.

Filtering down through the summer dawn
Tracing grey down to earth as moonlight
Silver in blue on new rising yellow shards
Onto the honeybee sheltering on a green leaf

Far from the collective embrace of her sisters

She sees the sun and the hive mind calls to her
‘Be at peace little sister and come home to us’
As the moon sets in the west over the new sky
So she rises to the air and heads to her family

Melding

The longer days melding vernal to summer run swiftly into the solstice

May flowers finally come of age late; hanging high within hedgerows
Pink-white lace laid on green gowns gives a rustic farewell to Spring
Drowns us in excess joy as seasons finally converge; erupting growth
In a helix from a drifting volcano sending plumes of green heavenward

The Breach

Deliberate not cost; but deem it worthy

Am I not without shame to desire you?
Like a new emergent locust into fertile rain
I will envelop you; overwhelm your heart
Savour each morsel of its feigned essence
Quench only the burning in my wings
That would take me unto the moon
Ere the wind blew in a right direction
Falter then in protestations of disdain
But remove prescience from wisdom not
For we need but open the door only a crack
And all the ghosts past rush into the breach

Through the Looking Glass

Shepherded to this place 

Empowered, de-evolving
Too soon to walk safely
Yet we continue to run
Into all the new days;
And unknown scenarios
Like warm ragged winds
Through unfamiliar country
We swirl around stunned
In all the empty promises
For we see how sweet
Life could be
Through the looking glass
If we lived on your side of it

The Smear

Released to this fast falling dusk of sighs

Into new night runs the smear of the day
For the soul of day must always meet night
Only then is the inspiration of man released
Into a full assault on the domain of reason
No less blacker than the yellowing dawn

Two of the new spring arrivals

A Star

To fall as a star

Shooting into night
On a curvature of pleasure
An erupting flower
That sheds it pollen
On a damp, moaning sky