Welcome back

Hi everyone, here I am back again.  Hopefully my laptop will stay with me to let me complete this.  I hope you are all well and enjoying 2014.  We had a lovely weekend a couple of weeks ago with my granddaughters first visit, to say we were rushed off our feet would be an understatement.  Now the house seems empty by comparison.

Today a quick jaunt around Cardiff, genning up on available haberdashers, their stocks and prices, followed by a long and leisurely coffee with friends before heading home for lunch.  As we sat and ate lunch looking out on a beautiful day clouds lightly peppering the skies we saw a heron circling presumably over the duck pond in the park beyond our road, gently gliding and soaring before it gracefully disappeared from sight, and I imagined it to be standing on the periphery of the duck pond amongst the reeds, patiently waiting for a fish to move before it could arch it's graceful neck into the water and re-appear with fish in beak, as has often been seen when we walk through the park.  It is amazing how long a heron can patiently wait becoming part of the backdrop of the pond, I have always  been amazed at the grace of such a gawky bird, but when we had fish ponds, was never quite so keen on them!

So until tomorrow, laptop permitting, thank you for joining me and have a lovely day wherever in the world you are.

Siwzy

The Great Blue Heron

BY CAROLYN KIZER  1880-September, 1955

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like grey smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.