MAY

The spring is fresh and fearless
And every leaf is new,
The world is brimmed with moonlight,
The lilac brimmed with dew.

Here in the moving shadows
I catch my breath and sing–
My heart is fresh and fearless
And over-brimmed with spring.

Sara Teasdale   May Night Poem

 

 

A moon over a Yorkshire moor…. I can hear the trundle of the poetry cart as one of the old favourites gets wheeled out again….

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –
And you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath –
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Ted Hughes   Full moon and little Freda

And here is a silhouette of the lesser-spotted Andrew Crocker in the large daylight room upstairs in the gallery with two new paintings, and Jane Sheppard’s lovely hand-coiled pots below.

 

Laurie Steen’s drawings are a celebration. They gesture reverentially towards the natural architecture of our rural surroundings. As I sit here and type, even though I am not out in the country it is lovely to be surrounded by these gorgeous works.

 

 

My walk to the train is 15 minutes, down a steep hill through a wood now decked out in cow parsley.
First thing on Monday morning I noticed a commotion in a nearby field.  There was a small gathering of magpies and crows.  I was busy counting the magpies (reciting the children’s rhyme) when I noticed in the centre of the birds’ focus was a little brown form – it looked like it may be an animal carcass.
The carcass then moved and stood up to reveal a roe deer doe. She was giving birth in the field, and no sooner had she finished cleaning the newly borns, two little fawns were standing and suckling.  Within minutes they were wandering around their mother with the same sentry-like deer gestures.  She had seen me so with difficulty I managed to get a few quiet phone snaps before losing my footing and tumbling on to the grassy bank.

 

 

Our heroes, in a Wiltshire field

And finally.…

When I die I shall go to May. It will be green. Not environmentally correct, for things will just be, without measurement or judgment, but actually the colour green in all its thousand shining faces. Every day will feel like Christmas Eve when I was ten. Every green leaf will be perfection exactly as it is and yet will grow and change every time I turn my eyes to it. Every moment will be like the arc of a diver breaking the waters of a green lake. I know this because this is what May is like here and now. Almost unbearable really. It does not hold for half an hour. Yet in the shifting, growing hymn of light and colour and leaf is the still, simple reason that I garden.

from Diaries of Note, 23 May 2004  Monty Don

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Thanks again for reading,

Aidan.