Tonight I am watching the Eurovision Song Contest without the sound on
There is a certain decadence about the performances
Like end of the Roman Empire
I can’t understand  how money is wasted  like this
When will Nero play his fiddle?
Still, good to see Northern Macedonia.At least I know where that is!
Maybe  Theresa May might like to Remain there
Or make a quick Exit, forensic?
Boris might like to  Trump all
Be careful what you wish for

The bees   are humming by the garden gate
The  dampness  makes the leaves  more green , more rich
As summer comes too early and too late

The ants upon my rowan tree  had faith
Busily they ran,  as if bewitched
The bees   are humming by the garden gate

The rowan tree has died, leaves not a trace
When it was felled, it left an empty pitch
Come  oh  wild flowers, leave no summer base

I watch  more ants, they seem to have no face
The rain leaves puddles in the empty ditch
The bees    will hover by the garden gate

The ants will help  their wounded  under threat
But having not a doctor, they’re  not stitched
Will summer come before it is too late?

From this world, we must try  not to flinch
When we leave it will be with a wrench
The bees   are humming by the garden gate
As summer comes too early by mistake

 

 

The Observer, Observed

“For Winter, Gopnik divides the season into five modes: Romantic, Radical, Recuperative, Recreational, and, finally, Remembering. “Romantic Winter” charts the transition from winter as a brutal, dangerous reality—people can freeze to death, after all—to one we can admire as picturesque and stroll through with pleasure and wonder. Throughout, he reflects upon poems by Samuel Johnson, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, scientific treatises on snowflakes, and the differing ideas about reason from the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment. “Radical Winter” investigates the obsession with reaching the Arctic and Antarctic poles. “The search for that spatial winter, the search for the poles, has become an obsessive subject for modern people. It’s the model of all exploration for exploration’s sake, exploration undertaken with a minimum of national advantage, a marginal economic purpose, and a maximal amount of adventure taken for adventure’s sake.”

If polar travellers are, as Gopnik puts it, “a kind of ecstatic monk of nature,” Christmas, which he explores in “Recuperative Winter,” is the paradigmatic secularized winter holiday. He uses “Recreational Winter” to briefly review the history of ice skating—ice skating paintings, ice skating poems, including a sublime passage on the subject from Wordsworth’s The Prelude—as well as hockey and his beloved Montreal Canadians”