Himba Colour Perception

On the radio someone from Dulux

Is explaining how we are new to blue,

How people from northern Namibia

Have no word for it.

This must be because they've never lain on hot sand

And stared up at eternity

Or down into your mad eyes.

SRP

Ghazal

Spilt wine

Seeps into the soil.

Spent lust

Seeps into the soil.

Let blood

Seeps into the soil.

Salt tears

Seep into the soil.

Beneath the wilting plant

Love seeps into the soil.

SRP

Albatross Gets Earful

A Jastrow's Albatross being aurally fed at the Inyuria bird sanctuary.

Bedroom Farcie

A dog called 'Haggis' wandered into my bedroom the other day and was promptly terrified.

Luckily he found solace on the sofa.

Fern Fever

I stumbled upon an abandoned cemetery in Vezelay the other day.

At the far left of the site this tomb caught my eye;

It was surmounted by a structure whose original purpose, I imagine, was to contain relics of some sort, it still has its lock.

The glass is broken and ferns have taken over, they give the impression that they are breaking out of a Wardian case. It would be nice to think that the entombed was a pteridomaniac.

Mumtaz

   “Some men, on leaving this vale of tears, are fortunate enough to leave behind them tangible and lasting evidence of their greatness. Their memories are perpetuated in the minds of generations to come by, perhaps, books they have written, discoveries they have made or edifices they have designed.

   What man living today, can pick up a copy of Oliver Twist without the magic name of Dickens immediately springing to mind? Who can look at an apple without thinking of Sir Isaac Newton (Discoverer of the Law of Gravity) or, perhaps, William Tell? A dullard, too, must he be who, on looking at a postcard of the Taj Mahal, does not remember Shah Jehan and his wife Mumtaz.”

From “The Journal of Edwin Carp” edited by Richard Haydn.

Musings of a Methodist Apostate

Some inhabit their heart

And drown.

Others live in the mind,

That spectral tenement

Full of clamour and doubt

(There are also those who patrol

The dungeons of the groin

Beating the walls with frantic fist).

But the happy live in their nose

Where the world comes to them

And, should the Black Death call by,

May blossom enthralls

Even when not there.

SRP