Today is the first day we have risked the washing line. The sheets go out first, pale faced in the morning brightness, skirts scattering about wind born legs. The sweaters are more resilient to such weather, they slouch from their pegs warming slowly arms raised like they are reaching to pin themselves in place. Caught by their knees, dresses fold over hang like school children from trees laughter in their fluttering. The garden becomes a gathering, loud in their wet chatter. Today is the first day we have risked a washing line, hope goes out first.
Now you have evaporated, I can see markers clear as crystal, so damn sparkly in retrospect. Forgetting, if you had added salt to the veg was as small as any mistake chalked up to forgetfulness. By the time you taste it you’re too late.
You have eaten my nose entirely, the whole of it nibbled and gnawed by your toothless grin slobber kissing my face. I do not extract you from this display of drool until I really, really must. Holding tight to all these small, soggy moments.
In part one I mentioned that the seed of inspiration for these blog posts was the quickly approaching tenth anniversary of my first poetry performance. Since then, I have read at open mics, poetry slams, and exhibitions, but my love for performing poetry began at Shrewsbury Museum in 2012. This post is going to look at the different types of poetry performance, while also paying tribute to some of my favourite memories and people.
Tonight’s poetics challenge from DVersePoets is to create our own major and minor seasons using the traditional format of Chinese and Japanese micro-seasons. Growing up in a farming family means that your sense of the year is always tied to the land, and I thought this might be a nice opportunity to share what January/February means on a farm in North Shropshire.
Sekki: Unearthed Abundance
Store lambs are bought in the Autumn, and sold on in the Spring. During the months in-between they need a source of food, and a good way to provide this is by grazing them on stubble turnips. The sheep will graze the leafy green tops off the crop first, leaving the field looking fairly barren, but the pink turnips that actually contain most of the nutrition remain below the surface. Without the easy to reach leaves to snack on, the sheep turn their attention to these. To represent this I chose ‘unearthed abundance’ as the name of my major season.
I was a little stumped as to what to name my minor season for this challenge. I decided to go with ‘where we repeat our tasks of preparing’ as my family are still in that point of the farming calendar where they are preparing. Lambing is a few weeks away since we don’t lamb as early in the season as some, and the day-to-day tasks revolve around fencing off new patches of grazing for the store lambs, getting reading for lambing, and keeping an eye on the cows close to calving. While the crops have been sown, in places the fields still look empty, and it is easy to be fooled into thinking this is a quiet time in the farming calendar. There are no quiet times.
Green leafing forage shifts in sections of fleeces one patch to the next
With new calves being born, thousands of store lambs grazing in the fields, and new pedigree lambs on their way, my parents’ farm is currently busy with livestock. Winter may not be quite over yet, but new life is there just beneath the surface. In my own garden, removed from the farm I grew up on, I can see this in our koi fish. Sunk to the bottom of the pond, they are waiting out the cold weather and look almost dead in their stillness. This is the way of this season, the barren hiding the plentiful.
Carol J Forrester 
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