There is so much I want to write about, but frustratingly I've had no time, for the best possible reasons: doing the work I love.
3 weeks in the beautiful French mountains running two intensive and fulfilling writing retreats back-to-back, home for a few days where I was laid low again with viral labyrinthitis, then 3 days (3 rather wobbly days, but very rewarding) working with Swiss Baccalaureate students who join me every year (courtesy of my friend B) to explore Dartmoor and the Devon and Cornwall coasts with creative and environmental writing.
It's past 9pm on Thursday night and I still haven't finished the stacked-up work I came back to and was too ill to do between the two lots of courses. But it's lovely to distract myself with a holding-post blog, and I wanted to share this picture of a tiny mouse, too young to be fearful, inches away from where I was squatting, and rolling back its acorn (it may not be clear in this picture but that's what it's gnawing) when it bounced away.
And now, tomorrow, it's my birthday so a treat is to spend the day out on the moor again visiting Devon Artists' Network's Open Studios (of which I was also a part a few years ago in my parallel life – then – as a painter).
So, here's a little thing. Going through some old boxes earlier I found a postcard of this poem I wrote. It comes from a year-long poetry residency I did in Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset as part of the Year of the Artist in 2000-2001, working collaboratively as one of a team of multidisciplinary artists, Genius Loci (the other 7 were visual and sound people):
Incantation
Wind the witches' way
Be language of daisy
Aconite, convolvulus
Read pipistrelle song, ride the crow's flight
Weave spells of bird-tracks on winter sky
Be crowned with mistletoe and ivy
Scry the light in the moon-pool's silver eye
Be dawn, be dusk,
Be the star-stung face
Of night embracing day.
© Roselle Angwin; poem displayed in The Witch's House at Hestercombe, 2000
I stumbled across the Witch's House at Hestercombe on my way back down the M5 one chilly summer's day - looking for somewhere quiet to eat my sandwiches, ended up staying all afternoon. Enjoyed the various follies in the gardens and the forested valley where I swear I heard mockingjays in the trees, but the witch's house gave me a solid bang on the head so maybe she didn't appreciate my visit!
ReplyDeleteAnother beautiful poem. I love 'scry the light'.
ReplyDeleteI hope you're feeling better now.
love
Marg xx
Katherine, lovely to have a comment from you and realise you're still reading my blog. Thank you. I hope all's been going well with you and your writing.
ReplyDeleteYes, the landscape garden has something, doesn't it? I loved that residency.
Marg, thank you! As you'll have realised it's a very old poem, so I'm glad you liked it.
Labyrinthitis has continued - as has the current spate of workshops with a novelists' weekend coming up now, and I've felt just too burnt out to write a blog. Have something in mind, though, about writing, so soon, I hope.
Rx