Alex D

"They're perfectly ripe."
Meredith cupped the first plum and twisted it gently from its stem.

'Leave them, Meredith. It's passed. They're coming. Witchcraft is illegal. We have to go.'

'Just a #moment, Lynn. You grab our familiars and the bags. I'm not wasting these. They're perfect.'

#vss365

I don't quite live ten miles from the desert, but we're very prone to drought here. Concentrates the mind!

I also dream of rain
Worship when it comes
Succour and spring
Healer of the cracked clays
Salve of dry stones in stream beds
Blood of trees

The window drums
Specks on the yard concrete hit and fade, blur and join,
The gutters start to run

And the smell of it
The brown grass gleaming
Will not die

Pipeline Know an American friend. A poet, 10 miles or so from the nearest desert. Tells me he dreams of rain: from the most heavily pregnant drops to the shyest fringe of spray. Laps up my tales of the bountiful stuff we get here everyday. I get by return: coughed-up dust, a brutal scrape of sun, that unfocusable call from barely inhabited lands. There’s a phone booth there as well, he says, edge of a former Reservation. Swears in the hammering heat, and though patently defunct, once he heard it ring-out for him.

Hullo #vss365 and to #scrape

Sorry to hear that. May you find your way through.

Excuse me, I don't want any bigots at my solstice festival.

Civis Romanus sum ...

Conclusion: I like Rachel Taylor. I don't know who she is and will have to look her up.

Thank you for producing this summary.

And in order to do that, first we stole from ourselves; our regions, our nations, our peoples - our dialects and languages. For a country to colonise others, it must first colonise itself.

Those at the apex saw themselves as New Rome, carving Latin injokes across the facades of public buildings.

I move #small things
A leaf without a breeze
A hair across your face to brush aside

- a slip of anger into your gut

The rippling of that wrath
I slide glassware on it
Smash it in walls, mirror and magnify
Fear flowers
Sweet gulp in my gullet
Chairs hurl so you

Flee

And I drink silence

#vss365

In CAPITAL letters
To disguise the writing
Or make hate plain
#someone
Dunno who

Person
Angry-bitter-poison-destroyer
Wrecking-crowbar-crosshair kisser

Wrote AGAIN
and
AGAIN
and
AGAIN

To you

Bin
Burn
Report
(You know you ought)
Hope they're caught

I'll hold you and sharpen my pen

#vss355

It's a big metal column with a ball on top. On a white plinth in a green field.

This is the Cocking Column - at Cocking, a village on the South Downs

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

Oh my beloved, you are fading
The #strait to the past grows wider
And on that distant shore, the turtle-dove is calling
The willow warbler pours song

Golden sparks of light fly from time's whetstone
The future is all I can clutch

Be a bridge, days,
Be a hope
Bring the birds home singing

#vss365

You and me both. Oh, I live in England, just not one of the posh bits. We had a good old 'Fuck you Mr Beeching' thread going on here a few weeks back. Give us back our branch lines, not this crap!

Also, this sucks.

A landscape view - Hadrian's Wall winds its way into this distance over moorclad hills and crags under a clouded sky

Did this wall create the idea of Scotland and England? Or was that already there? Or did it come later?

Is it a brutal imposition on the landscape? An adornment to the crags of the Whin Sill?

I let all that swim in and out of focus while I admired its survival and how damn steep it is.

I am so glad when people put subtitles on their videos. I infinitely prefer my videos on mute with subtitles.

There's something about an unmuted video which sets off my 'making a phone call' panic. Printed words are so much - quieter.

Tyrian Purple — Uncovering Roman Carlisle A very rare archaeological discovery - thought to be the only one of its type in the former Roman Empire - has been discovered in Carlisle.

Nice addition to the Britannia pigment collection - are you aware of the probable Tyrian purple found at Luguvalium? www.uncoveringromancarlisle.co.uk/blogs/tyrian...

It's easy to underestimate words compared with art because writing is a skill we all need to acquire at a basic level to function in this society -

- which is to say, Madam, you are damn good with words, and your work will stand comfortably alongside their art.

When words
#splinter in the heart
Do not withdraw them

The shaft is intended
The damage is everything

Flat triptych angels Joy, Sorrow, Hope
Are little enough in gesso

Now you bleed the tears of conmingling

And that pain is richness

#vss365

#Sunbeam magnified in the empty house
Finds wood under the dust

Smoke creeps
Across the cup-marked desk and catches
The first pile of old bills

Licks at the peeling damask of the walls
Assails the beams and vanquishes the damp for ever

Pyre for the old man
Who clung here
So long

#vss365

Come on then, who was it?

That looks very productive grassland with all that white clover, lol.

A moor at high elevation. Coarse grass and low cloud, and a long view of further hills. A rainbow arches across the left of the picture, touching the ground in front of the further hills - it looks as if it would be easy to judge where to dig for the pot of gold.

Happy #Pride Month, everyone

If you want physical books take physical books. It's a holiday and is meant to be about enjoying yourself.

The Wizard Gardener's Invocation

By spade and by rake and harrow,
May I suffer no slug, weed and sparrow
On a great pile of muck
To the size of a truck
I summon a prize-winning #marrow!

#vss365

Drought anxiety is most certainly a thing. I have been suffering acutely.

Storm cave under the sea mountain
A slew of seal-skins
Heaped
Did you think
Only for human mem
The #selkies transform

Here
Secret in earth-rind
Beaching
Water embraces water
Skein in skein

All you who yearn
To melt
In a lover's body

You hold
A shadow of this sea

#vss365

This is wicked, and they're going to try and smother dissent in the ol' 'Oh, you support rapists then?'

How are there so many of them? How are they so unified? How did they look like a better option than the Tories to so many people only a year ago?

We need a real opposition party. Now.

I already called and got him to back off the East Suffolk line with threats of witchcraft. Afraid that was all I had time for.

Oh hang on, let's all call him.