Six Word Saturday: Walking with Anna on Rossglass Beach

We took off right after dinner, in a hurry to arrive at our destination before the sun went down. As soon as we parked, we began walking. We could see the outlines of the Mountains of Mourne in the distance. The sand was powdery and fine. The only other people on the beach were a group of teenagers daring each other to get into the freezing water.

I was wearing the wrong shoes: cloth sneakers. My feet quickly got wet, after the tide began coming in. Anna said she was going to visit friends who had a cottage on an island on the other side of the Mountains of Mourne. Wow! If I could find an Airbnb there, I’d go in a heartbeat.

Thank you to Debbie Smyth for hosting #SixWordSaturday on her blog, Travel with Intent.

Stay tuned.

Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge (CMMC): Yellow or Purple Colors

Doing these challenges are so much fun. Self very much enjoyed the intensity of Cee’s yellow and purple gallery!

Here is her own gallery: photos with YELLOW and PURPLE.

The big yellow YO is in front of the Cantor Art Center on the Stanford University Campus. The buttons were give-aways from the latest AWP Conference in Philadelphia. The daffodils are in the garden at River Mill, Co. Down, Northern Ireland.

Cee’s Flower of the Day: GORSE

There are so many hedges in rural Northern Ireland. Since it is still early in the spring, most look like this:

Before too long, they will all look like this:

Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day (FOTD).

Lens-Artists Challenge: BOKEH

Yesterday, the weather in Northern Ireland was pretty gloomy. It rained almost the entire day. No one, not even the most committed walkers, felt like going out.

Self had been fascinated by the window sills of this old stone house: moss grows on them. She’d been wanting to take a picture of the moss growing on the window sills ever since the first day she got here. Yesterday’s weather, combined with the Lens-Artists Challenge this week, motivated her to give it a try. Without further ado:

Self was photographing through a rain-streaked windowpane, hence the smudges.

Not sure what bokeh is? Here’s how Sofia over at Photographias explains it:

• What is bokeh? We all have seen this effect; we have photos with it. The term bokeh was first used to distinguish normal motion blur from the blur obtained when things are out of focus. It literally means blur in Japanese. The Nikon website, after a more complex and technical explanation reduces it to simply this: “bokeh is the pleasing or aesthetic quality of out-of-focus blur in a photograph”. Personally, I believe a good bokeh is as important as the subject itself, it can really transform a photo from ordinary into something a little bit more special.

Poetry Wednesday: Paul Maddern

Excerpt, Found: I

— from letters sent by Paul Nash to his wife Margaret

21 March 1917, near La Clytte:

The willows are orange,
the poplars carmine with buds,
the streams gleam brightest blue
and flights of pigeons
go wheeling about the fields.

Messed up with all this normal
beauty of nature you see
the strange beauty of war.

• Paul Maddern was born in Bermuda and lives in Co. Down, Northern Ireland. He obtained his PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre and has since taught at the universities of Leeds, Edinburgh and Queen’s Belfast. Found I is from the collection Pilgrimage (Templar Poetry, 1917)

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: WOOD

Self is going to interpret this week’s CFFC a little, shall we say, creatively. Trees and hedges do not immediately leap to mind when she thinks of “wood.” Nevertheless.

On her walk this morning, she saw some very neatly sheared hedges. Okay, hedges aren’t normally woody, but these in Norhtern Ireland are. They’re used in lieu of fences, to keep sheep and other livestock within a farm’s boundaries:

And here’s an old tree growing between the men’s and women’s bath houses in Stuell Wells, Co. Down. Self and a fellow resident went exploring a few days ago, and Paul, our host here at River Mill, suggested we check out some ancient ruins. The monks built a well on this site, dating to the 9th century.

And here’s a flimsy wooden fence keeping some cows from fording a stream:

Cellpic Sunday: Co. Down, Northern Ireland

Took this picture yesterday evening, on a walk down a country lane with a fellow resident at River Mill. This is self’s entry for Journey with Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday challenge.

Poetry Monday: Herbert Asquith (1881 – 1947)

AFTER THE SALVO

from the anthology The War Poets: An Anthology (Norwich: Jarrold Publishing, 2nd printing 2005)

Up and down, up and down,
They go, the gray rat, and the brown.
The telegraph lines are tangled hair,
Motionless on the sullen air;
An engine has fallen on its back,
With crazy wheels; on a twisted track;
All ground to dust is the little town;
Up and down, up and down
They go, the gray rat and the brown.
A skull, torn out of the graves nearby,
Gapes in the grass. A butterfly,
In azure iridescence new,
Floats into the world, across the dew;
Between the flow’rs. Have we lost our way,
Or are we toys of a god at play,
Who do these things on a young Spring day?
Where the salvo fell, on a splintered ledge,
Of ruin, at the crater’s edge,
A poppy lives: and young, and fair,
The dewdrops hang on the spider’s stair,
With every rainbow still unhurt
From leaflet unto leaflet girt.

Man’s house is crushed; the spider’s lives:
Inscrutably, He takes, and gives,
Who guards not any temple here,
Save the temple of the gossamer.

Up and down, up and down
They go, the gray rat, and the brown:
A pistol cracks, they too are dead.

The nightwind rustles overhead.

One Word Sunday Challenge: FOUND

Travel with Intent’s One Word Challenge this Sunday is FOUND. Her photo of a relief from Pompeii is amazing in its detail. It was “from the tomb of an organizer of gladiator games.”

Self’s FOUND photos are a little humorous. She’s doing a writer’s residency in Northern Ireland. On an after-dinner walk with a fellow resident, she found these animals coming in closer for another look. They were intrigued, right? People like self being somewhat of a rarity in these parts.

Poetry Sunday: Siobhan Campbell

An excerpt from The shame of our island

is that we killed the wolf.
Not just the last
but the two before that.

I knew a man who met a man
who was the cousin removed
of the great-grandson of the man
who killed the third-last wolf
on the island.

Slit it he did,
to see the steaming innards —
how long they were, how tightly wound.

Had it a white paw to the fore?
That gene would have been recessive.

The shame of our island is part of the collection Heat Signature (Seren Books, an imprint of Poetry Wales Press, 2017)

• About the author: Siobhan Campbell was born in Dublin. Her collections of poetry are Cross-Talk (Seren), The Permanent Wave and The Cold that Burns (Blackstaff Press) and chapbooks The water speaks in tongues (Templar) and Darwin Among the Machines (Rack Press).