just around the corner!!!...

The potter is in hospital...never really ill in our lives together and out of the blue....this!!
So in the Poetry Review post today this poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson came up from Ulysses and seemed to touch me very deeply in a situation that I had never been in before...


There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought
               with me - 
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all:but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes:the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans around with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; 
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to find, and not to yield.


I love the lines...Though much is taken.... down to the last line...to strive, to find, and not to yield.
That says it all!

Hunter and Hunted

Once again we cycled down to the river.
The weather is on the turn now, but the Ferry area was just as calming.
The gulls were congregated on the bank opposite waiting for the incoming tide.

Why had they risen as one with such noise?

Then we spotted a lone bird hovering over the reeds.

More joined it, until there were four or five of them circling and hovering, still and menacing.

Suddenly up from the reeds came a caccophany of noise as a flock of crows rose high in the sky.

I managed to snap them as they rose.
Only later when I viewed on the Lumix site did I notice in amongst the crows a very different shape......
.......buzzards I'm told!
Nature is so many different things. We love the sense of peace that it can bring us...
.... but abhor the "red in tooth and claw". Yet one cannot be without the other.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote as part of the poem In Memorium A.H.H.   these lines......

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.