Attraction

Tags

attraction, Buddleia, bussokusekika, butterfly

 

You, white Buddleia,

are a butterfly magnet;

generous hostess.

How do they all know to come?

What attracted me to you?

Lechlade Bathers

Tags

Acherontia atropos, bourgeoisie, Charles I, Chinook, Courbeville, Death's Head, fuselage, Halfpenny Bridge, Indian Summer, Lechlade, Lichtenstein, mandorla, Piero della Francesca, pill box, Pointillist, Quattrocento, Seurat, thorax, Wham!

 

No belching smoke plume smuts the bathers here.

This is unlike Courbeville, where a boy

once hailed strollers on the opposite bank:

Hey, we the working class are the future!

Why don’t you come and join us, bourgeoisie?

 

No, we walk over the water meadows,

having emerged from under The Halfpenny Bridge,

passing the uninhabited barges.

Hawthorn berries bleed against a blue sky,

fusing the day with divisionist tones.

 

(Photo: Ballista at en. wikipaedia)

 

Six swans pose before a lichened pill box.

The spire’s reflection is a mandorla–

a mercury stain.  And, in an instant,

we move from Seurat’s Pointillist moment

and the figures enjoying a brief dip

on this Indian summer afternoon,

to something more akin to Lichtenstein.

 

 

The little Quattrocento fresco group,

with Piero della Francesca profiles,

find its peace shattered-not by industry,

but by a military cargo plane,

like an Acherontia atropos,

with a skull-marked thorax on the fuselage.

That Death’s Head was first seen when Charles I

was executed.  Whose thread will be cut?

Are we under threat from war, death, hunger,

or pestilence, more deadly than a flea

escaping from a wool bale long ago

and bringing devastation in its wake?

 

A whirring Chinook gnat follows its course.

The corpse paths between the churches darken.

Maybe a vestry curtain will be ripped.

 

Towelled, the children shiver in the shade.

Chalk Hill Blues

Tags

Chalk Hill Blues, Compton Down, damselflies, dongas, dragonflies, fritillaries, plague, St Catherine's Hill, Venetian glass, William Rufus

 

An old one, but worth a re-run maybe?

(Male Chalk Hill Blue, photographed on 2/8/008

by Rosenzweig)

CHALK HILL BLUES

Fine dongas’ etched capillaries

trace downs in criss-cross engravature.

In pure air, flimsy with fritillaries,

Chalk Hill Blues, by divine imprimatur,

caper.  Deft dragonflies, volts from the blue:

thoraxes like mottled Venetian glass,

hover, with pink damselflies, over dew-

dipped vegetation.  Those who would pass

by to reach St Catherine’s coronet (beech

circle)- Iron Age travellers, or those

who buried their plague victims- did not breach

Nature’s contract; nor did those who opposed

that livid, open wound, scarring the cant,

observable from Compton Down.  This way,

once pilgrim path, in earshot of thin chant

from cloisters, now roars, a snarling highway,

bar of shame on history’s escutcheon.

Rufus’ cartwheels no longer rut clay;

but his blood badges the route to destruction.

 

(Death of William Rufus by Neuville)

Roundel

Tags

Buddleia, Painted Ladies, peacock butterfly, roundel, St Swithun's Day

Forgot to post this on St Swithun’s Day.  The weather was changeable, as I

recall, so this hopeful poem, written many years ago, may not be

appropriate for this year!  Still, one has to be optimistic.

Now welcome Summer with its clear blue sky,

its dim green tunnels with enticing shade-

the humid air buzzing with insect life.

St Swithun’s Day has left us high and dry.

Forty days of rain we now evade.

Now welcome Summer with its clear blue sky,

its dim green tunnels with enticing shade.

Buddleia blossoms to the ground are weighed,

where Peacocks, Painted Ladies are arrayed.

Now welcome Summer with its clear blue sky,

its dim green tunnels with enticing shade;

the humid air buzzing with insect life.

(Wikipaedia and Wikimedia: photos.

Butterfly by Sharp Photography.)