These are the day themes for the next ten days:
11. Follow a bumblebee
12. Make a map of local wildlife
13. Record what you see in your garden or at a park
14. Set up your own moth trap with a sheet and torch
15. Help create a hedgehog highway
16. Watch a wild webcam Wildlifetrusts.org/webcam
17. Go on a bughunt
18. Visit your local park at dusk and look for bats
19. Set up camp in or outdoors
20. Watch the sunrise or sunset
A FORGOTTEN BICYCLE
It leans against the old summerhouse,
rusty wheel spokes a nod to its former
glory days as champion of forays into nature.
Wilted bouquets overhang the woven basket:
Withered lilac still murmuring lines from
summer sonnets, sweet pea symphonies with their
spectral arpeggios, rising and falling in cadences,
like gusting leaves across manicured lawns,
chasing away all traces of seasonal depression.
Birds sing full-throated, their daffodil chorus
echoing round the orchard garden,
hedgehogs wake snuffling in the musty woodpile.
At full moon new life throbs through the crippled frame,
sounding the bell in time with the hooting owls,
beckoning fairy folk to mount the saddle, take a ride.
They fly down in the bells of virgin snowdrops,
Filling the basket with crocus and lesser celandine
speeding to the woods in search of early narcissi.
What stories come to mind as they revel in magical
flight through moonlit meadows and glades.
Released from years of neglect, the old girl lives again.
-Margaret Royall (From her collection “When Flora Sings”
gleaning
the harvest fields
golden sunset
~ Christina Chin
Fireflies’s Light
Ruin on Lewis by Dave Green
Bios and Links
-Christina Chin
-Dave Green
lives and works in Sheffield. For 30 years he worked in education with vulnerable and neurodiverse children before belatedly discovering that recent governments may not be prioritizing the marginalized in society. Now he trains people in positive mental health and how to recover from the pandemic. He writes poems, paints, chops logs, cycles everywhere and shops local.
The Wombwell Rainbow 