Lughnasadh Greetings from The Hill of the Poets
I am thinking of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant - the grasshopper singing and playing music through the golden pleasure of the summer, and the ant toiling away laying up stores for the winter to come. We have had our grasshopper time - some lovely weather, some too hot, a little too wet. We even got a holiday this year, visiting the north of England. We had trips on a miniature railway and the Ullswater ferry, visited a mill, a castle and a walled garden, and had a very satisfying and inspiring stop on the way home at Dilston Physic Garden, which I blogged about last week.
But now we are home, and the grain is ripening in the fields. The second brood bluetits and robins are in the garden and the starling class of 25 is growing its mature winter plumage. The gulls got high on the ant swarms last week and the buddleia lived up to its nickname, being covered in butterflies - peacocks, red admirals, large and small whites and even a painted lady or two. It’s been a very good year for insects at large, and the humming of bees on the lavender and hyssop startles you as you go out of the front door. Unfortunately the good year also includes rosemary beetle, and I haven’t been able to keep up with their destruction.
The new culinary patch has bedded in well, and I’m planning a Mediterranean area for next year, where I can put pots of half-hardy herbs like lemon verbena and scented pelargoniums, and perhaps add Cretan thyme or za’atar. On the other hand, in the magical garden the mugwort has bullied almost everything else into submission, and I will have to move it to behind the shed, where perhaps it will keep all the cats off the rhubarb.
But although this is the season when I expect to hear most grasshoppers, it’s time to be more ant, thinking about storing away resources for the darker days to come, and I have been drying herbs - mint, chamomile and yarrow - and making jam. Both the blackcurrants and the gooseberries have done better than I expected, and the damsons are ripening and blueing on our tree. Damsons are not popular in Scotland, and it’s years since I’ve been able to make damson jelly, so this is very exciting.
Lughnasadh comes at the time of the grain harvest - early this year because of the dry spring, and even the wheat and barley that sprouted under the bird feeder is ready. It’s a time for gathering in, but also for sharing, as so many celebrations involve harvest feasting. The situation in Gaza (and also Sudan and Yemen) provides a terrible counterpoint to this. If the current sabotage of efforts to mitigate climate change continues, we are all going to face situations of scarcity and insecurity of supply, and we have to decide now that there is no decency in simply stock-piling stuff for ourselves, and telling other people we can’t spare anything for anyone else.
Here on the Hill of the Poets, the big turf wars are about peace and quiet. We have a lot of children, all back from their holidays, with time on their hands, and nowhere to be. So they are all outside our house - not all the time, but often. There is grass and a hilly path to ride bikes down and a lot of houses they can visit and they do, from about mid-day to ten o’clock at night. The girls are noisy, but the boys run quiet, in single file like jungle explorers. Occasionally Grace O’Malley (not her name, I’ve called her after the Irish pirate queen of the sixteenth century), the boss of the girl squad, lets the boys play too, which is very good to see. There are a few tetchy posts on the estate Facebook page - noise, cheeky attitudes, minor damage, and a couple of warnings to drivers who come into the estates at dangerous speeds, but to be honest I love it. If you know the poem
you might feel that a bit of rush and chaos is a small price to pay for the privilege of having the young ones around!There were few children where we used to live, and it is good to see the ones who live here enjoying their freedom.
In poetry news, the burnedthumb.co.uk domain is retiring and will no longer redirect to the blog at burnedthumb.com. This will be getting a refresh shortly, with the subtitle Of Herbs and Poetry - it’s good to get a focus at last! The older posts have been archived for reference, and as it’s over twenty years it will be some size!
The main site will be having a refresh too, to include news of the new collection, finally to be called Comrades of Dark Night. If you are picking up echoes of St John of the Cross’s term, ‘dark night of the soul’ there, it is deliberate, as there are some explorations of midnight goings on, in many different dimensions. All the poems are there now, though some of them still need to be knocked into shape. There are a lot of herb poems in it too, with the Lacnunga responses (plus the actual translation for reference) and the small Charms for the Healing of Grief, so I hope it won’t come across as too dark! It will be out in March of next year, so please watch out for announcements of launch events, but in the meantime you can find some of the poems in Littoral Magazine and in the next three issues of Mugwort.
I have been reading
The Land in Our Bones by Layla K. Feghali, which adds new dimensions to the awful situation in the Middle East, and has some wonderful insights into the connections between herbs and land, culture and community.
Passion By David Morley, wonderful poems about birds and Romani culture
The Lost Folk by Lally McNab, which explores folk culture, rather anglo-centric for sensible reasons, but upends a lot of stereotypes about folklore and tradition.
also a lot of fiction and other frivolous stuff - but I have been on holiday!
I hope you are still enjoying your grasshopper days, and that the responsibilities of being an ant give you a wonderful harvest!