Lynne Rees's Blog

                      almost October
                      the pumpkins allowed
                      a few more days of grace

The balance of our hearts

There is something
about the sound of heavy rain 

through an open door
or from the shelter of a loggia

that opens my heart
to both comfort and sorrow

and I am unable to explain it,
or unpick a meaning.

We live with dichotomies -
anxiety and exhilaration,

love and loss, that feeling,
when we were so much younger, 

of never wanting a party to end
and the desperate need for sleep.

Rilke wrote about
living the questions

not searching for answers
and so I will sit here and listen 

to the rain on the glass roof
my heart like a fulcrum

between joy and sadness:
the sweet spot of not-knowing.

Slow 

For Linsky

I always believed the woods weremade up of alder and birch, grown for coppicing, felt familiar with theirskinny, light-seeking trunks, the bounces left behind by squirrels in their highbranches, the insistent knocks of woodpeckers. 

Perhaps I have somehow missed runningthrough them in early July, or if I did was more concerned with avoiding treeroots and the ankle-twisting hardened ruts of mud because I have never before witnessedthis … 

… what looks like, for the briefestof moments, thousands of hairy caterpillars draped over brambles, holly bushes,ferns, before they quickly reveal themselves to be the long yellow catkins froma mature sweet chestnut tree.

Running serves me well, my bodyand mind rebalancing with every stride, each deep breath, but this morning’sslow stroll is a gift from a friend searching for flowers and leaves she can pressinto eternity.

Castanea sativa, literally ‘brown chestnut’. The deceptionof the ordinary. The wondrousness of it all.

 

 

 

 

Ordinary things

After I glimpse the guys in hi-vis jackets
planting trees on a bank
at the side of the motorway
and protecting them from rabbits
with tall white collars

I look back to the road and notice
the sky ahead of me has broken
into a swathe of blue and I feel
that flip of joy inside me - you know the one,
as if your heart and your stomach
have performed their own little high five -
and it reaches my face in a smile.

Moments like this save me
over and over, ordinary things filled
with light and thoughtfulness
reminding me the world I want
to live in can still be found. 

Superposition
‘…the quantum effect where particles exist concurrently in multiple places – has, historically speaking, only been thought to apply to tiny, subatomic particles.’  Dr Stefan Forstner, University of Queensland. 
If the speed of human thought is 10 bits per secondthen for a tenth of a second this morning I was both
running alongside the A20 and at home still curledbeneath the duvet, as if I was experiencing a parallel life, 
as if I was existing in two places at once, for a moment,the blink of an eye, a heartbeat, an instant, a jiffy, a trice. 
I know about the expansion of time in dreams, how hours are compressed into minutes, how our subconscious taps
into a limitless store of thoughts and feelings, an infinitenumber of things touched, smelled, heard, spoken, or seen.
But how in a waking state could I be so convinced of beingconcurrently here and there, both moving and still?
The sky is a persistence of cloud, its low mist erasing trees, meeting fields, dampening my face, my hair; I feel like 
a conduit between two states: earth and water. Perhaps we always exist in dualities but rarely notice. Perhaps I am
beginning to understand both the beauty and decay of my wondrous life, the gift and theft of inevitable death. 

 

                    

                    even in winter
                    between the mud and decay
                    new growth and sunlight

 

Trees, magic, kindness
No matter how often it happensthere is still something magicalabout running between trees,between two flanking rows of poplarsor around the rolling trailsin the woods, the spindly light-seekingtrunks moving in the wind, or here in open fields along a path between two oaks ignoring the call of autumn and taking things in their own time.  
And today the magic is heightenedby the warmth of the winter sun and the word I have learned for that: apricity. The consonants sparkling on my tongue as I feel the heaton my face, stepping over puddles wearing their wrinkled coats of ice,and take the track towards home.Then wondering whether I should stop or carry on running when I see 
the unleashed dog ahead. But a woman calls it to heel, stands fast at the side of the barren field so I don’t have to make a choice. Thank you, I say. Solovely, isn’t it. The day, her kindness. 

 

Coming second

Row after poly-tunnel row across the top field
are still bursting with green leaves and speckled

with unripe raspberries. My first thought is
these are the ones that missed their chance,

the ones that didn’t meet the season’s timing
of fruiting, plumping and ripening, the ones

that failed to catch the late summer days when
we had sun followed by rain then sun again 

and the canes were jewelled with soft, deep-pink.
But I am wrong – there is another harvest to come

between August and October. There is still
another chance to be ready, to be bold, for each

jewelled fruit to fall into the hands of pickers,
like these two I found at the end of one row.

Some of us take our time. Some of us take
our own sweet time to be a beautiful second. 

For Tony Rees
5th August 1927 to 22nd December 2020

Like whispers

I think the weight
of them is undoing
the plait, the spaces 
between each onion 
getting bigger each day.
I should take it down 
before one morning
I get up to see 
onions scattered 
across the yorkstone slabs.
But I know the dried necks
will be impossible
to tie again, they will
flake to nothing 
between my fingers
and for as long as 
they hang there
I can conjure my father
in his garden, his own 
plaits of onions 
in the dark hold 
of the coalbunker
or the lean-to shed
their papery skins 
loosening 
and floating 
to the floor
like whispers 
like so many memories.    

The hay tedder on the back of the tractor, that lifts and turns the cut hay, gets its name from the verb, ‘ted’, from the Old English ‘teddan’ that has Scandinavian and Old Norse origins. The hayman tells me that while machinery has changed the labour and pace, the process of gathering hay has remained unchanged for a millennium: cutting, turning, raking, baling. 

the hay's second turnthe gathering of swallowson the telephone lines