Art Challenge...post one a day!

Today I've posted an edited photo taken as part of a series when we went to find Derek Jarman's cottage on the shingle in Dungeness.

"The Abandoned Boat"

What an amazing place...a wilderness of stone and sea...yet full of life with such banks of marine wild flowers and a glimpse of a hare running away from his cottage.

I may never get a chance to return...but the memories are strong and quite a bit of poetry resulted from that visit.

"The Abandoned Boat"

Wild flowers on the shingle.

 The emptiness of the landscape.

Rusting metal everywhere hidden in the maran grasses.

Sculptural rusting metals...abandoned.

The Hare that Lops.

Excitement mounts

The poet’s house

Camera at the ready

Miss not one thing

Not one moment

Not one significant symbol

Then …click.

Out he ran fast

Out from the flowers

Out of the ring of wood

The sculptures of iron

The redeemed of the shingle.

Out he speed

And I feared I had lost him.

There in the corner of my eye

To the left of my sight

To the safety of the gorse

He ran barrel-lunged

Longlegged

Muscle thighed.

And I am left panting

With eyes bulging

And voice screaming

“A hare…a hare!”

Tearing over the rough ground

Away from the poet’s house

Then…click.

Only later do I find

The faithfulness of the camera

With a faster lens that mine

Caught him

Ears high

Eyes staring

Feet fleeting

Disappearing

And I smile.

A little quote from ..."derek jarman's garden"
 "The rabbits have gone - I'm happy about that, but welcome the hare that lops past. A hare is the queer animal of myth, and my, they go fast."


This is linked up to dVerse open link night week 52...congratulations on a whole year of poetry!

A Poem for Thursday.

The Outing to Dungeness

Prospect Cottage

Basically it was just a hut
A fisherman’s hut
Along with all the other huts
Now I love a hut
I would like a hut by the sea
Not too much to keep tidy
And the sound and smell of it all…


Basically it was not really a garden
Just the way you collect bits of plants along the beach
And hope that they might take root
And help you to remember that day
By the sea on the beach
In the shingle…

Really it was not sculpture
Not what those earnest artists
Like Andy or the Welsh man would think of as sculpture
More like me when I walked the sands at Ballyferris
And picked up the rubbish that the others had dropped
Well I say the rubbish
I never actually thought of it that way…


Really I wasn’t too sure about the yellow windows
And the writing on the end wall
All about the sun
Though the mist obscured it that day
And the words were a bit small
Now that my eyesight is not what it was…


So what made me cry?
For it was only a fisherman’s hut
It was only the shingle all around it by the road
It was only railway sleepers upended
Standing like a modern Stonehenge
And the perfume of the gorse
And the yellow horned poppies…

No really …there was not much there you know.


[This was the day that we went looking for Derek Jarman's house on the shingle in that magic spot called Dungeness. The brochure say the largest area of shingle in Europe. Full of wild sea flowers, protected by the local authorities....mysteriously beautiful.]