congrats to Carol Ann Duffy!

So proud to have a new Poet Laureate – and yes, it is, after all quite a new thing (in this day and age even…) to have a woman in the role.

all the best to her!

Below is a great poem of Carol Ann Duffy’s which articulates amazingly what it’s like in that difficult bit of life when we’re away from the one we love…

Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

weeds?!

of all the lovely things in the garden, I confess I have quite a soft spot for some of the alleged weeds…

     

Eleanor Blakely Dickinson’s poem, ‘Forget me not’ ends with these words:

….Like thoughts of home in climes afar;
Like evening’s still returning star;
Like tears which fall when the heart is sad,
Almost as sweet as that heart were glad;
Like friendship found where we sought it not;
In bower and garden, in field and grot,
Spring thy fair flowers, Forget me not.

 

It’s not an original thought to wonder who decides which things are weeds, and who decides what ‘the right place’ for them to grow is anyway… maybe something beautiful always finds itself in the right place?