National Poetry Day

In my little corner of the Internet it's all about National Poetry day today (and my youngest sisters birthday, Happy Birthday, Sophie) so inbetween naps and antibiotics that what I've been thinking about. (I've got a bitch of a chest infection which won't shift, it's been almost a month of feeling like death warmed up. I should have gone to the doctors earlier which is making me feel like an idiot for trying to tough it out and getting so run down in the process.)

I know we occasionally had poetry inflicted upon us at primary school, and remember encountering it in an altogether more positive way at junior high level. At about the same time I took to writing (really awful) verse as I assume many adolescent's still do. It wasn't until the first term of A level English when we studied Keats that I really began to understand the pleasure to be had from reading poetry though, or to get an inkling of the power that can be stored in a few well chosen words.

It's a pleasure that lasts.

I'm sharing Jen Hadfield's The Moult' to celebrate the day, it, and more can be found Here

The Moult

Stay out of the sun:
we can all see you. Stop picking fights
above your weight. We've this high

golden bowl of heather and moss
company of whaups and cries and
mutters in the wind; the long

draught of islands

and blinding sea.

Shelter in the hoodoos and pluck
your fur - fine smelt caught on heather
and shining reeds -

ruing it as I do, this flying
gleaming floss snatched back
and spent by the wind.

Freeze when the sunlight hits you

you're not invisible. Scratch off

your dreamcoat of silver money.
Rest downwind in the sun. Run
double-jointed when the valley dims.

Jen Hadfield
from Byssus (Picador, 2014)