Category Archives: beauty

Faint stars

August 16, 2017astronomy, beauty, poem, Poetryastronomy, exmoor, poem, poetry, sky, starsThe Cheesesellers Wife

Faint stars pooled like milk at zenith
Coloured lights tracking across
Blinking
Deep night swallows all light
Here on the Moor

Alpine River

August 5, 2017beauty, Life, nature, poem, PoetryAlpine, France, Life, nature, poem, poetry, river, travelThe Cheesesellers Wife

Even in the allegedly flat valley
The river ran boiling over its rocky bed
Looking out of our cabin window
I could see white electric splashes of water
Gashing along in evening gloom
Boisterously noisy in Alpine stillness
Laughing around boulders
Burbling drunkenly against its banks
Massive ice its head waters
The river was attempting an escape
Scrambling over obstacles
Scudding away from the mountains
To lazy riverine days on plains below

Blue Anchor beach

July 31, 2017art, beauty, exmoor, nature, Painting, watercolourart, Blue Anchor, exmoor, fossil, nature, Painting, watercolourThe Cheesesellers Wife

A watercolour painting of the eastern end of Blue Anchor beach, near Exmoor. This is where we have collected many fine fossils. Painted in 2016 — the rocks have been battered by further winter storms and look a bit different this year.

Dawn creeps across the land

July 26, 2017art, beauty, poem, Poetry, watercolour, Wild lifebeauty, dawn, Life, poem, poetry, sky, sun, watercolour, Wild lifeThe Cheesesellers Wife

Dawn creeps across the land
Shining her pale light into nests
Causing baby birds to call for food
Dormice to rub their eyes and blink
Ants to speed up their hurrying and scurrying
She reaches up to wash the sky with pale blue
And a hint of rose at the east
And , as a special treat today, the west
Smiling to herself as the world awakes
She feels a certain self satisfaction as the Sun
With a near audible plop
Detaches itself from the horizon
Then like any other woman
Readies herself for a busy day

First published on In Between Hangovers: https://inbetweenhangovers.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/dawn-creeps-across-the-land-by-kim-whysall-hammond/

Flight

July 15, 2017beauty, nature, poem, Poetry, Wild lifebirds, flight, poem, poetry, Red Kite, skyThe Cheesesellers Wife

Oh to slip into the sky, to soar and dance and tumble
Murmurate, swoop and stoop
Twisting twining the wind to my joy
Spiralling updrafts to rise
Then
Tumbling wheeling through sundrenched clouds
Cavorting with the very air
The delirious burning blue

Written after watching Red Kites tumble and play through the sky above my garden.

With thanks to Pt Off. John Gillespie Magee for the last line (from his poem High Flight)

Monday Watercolour: Azores sailing boat

July 10, 2017art, Azores, beauty, nature, Painting, Technologyart, azores, boat, Horta, Painting, sailing, watercolourThe Cheesesellers Wife

Re-starting my Monday watercolours…….

This is a traditional Azorean whaling boat, which I saw sailing in a regatta at Horta Sea Week in 2015.

Shallowford

July 8, 2017beauty, nature, poem, Poetrybeauty, exmoor, Life, nature, poem, poetry, travel, walkingThe Cheesesellers Wife

Hard round folds of green billow down to a cleft
A valley in the high moor
Ahead, a quilt of brighter hue lies piecemeal
Where wild moor has been tamed
As we walk, a second valley reveals itself
A child of fields not moor, sweet and wooded
At the meeting of the valleys we will turn to leave
The quiet high places, these hard round folds of green

We are walking on Exmoor this week

Only Exmoor

July 5, 2017art, beauty, exmoor, Life, nature, poem, Poetry, Wild lifebeauty, exmoor, Life, Moor, nature, travel, Wild lifeThe Cheesesellers Wife

Only Exmoor stretches out to embrace the whole sky in its immensity
Reflects its moods and colours, its nurture and destruction
Only the moor is as fickle as the sky

Today the moor is swallowed as clouds subsume the uplands
Yesterday it shed water like the clouds themselves
Tomorrow it will shimmer with heat, dry and unforgiving

Trees hide in hollows, afraid to stand in the open
Sheep bones litter the spring hillsides
Peaty silty bogs nestle with gorse , bracken and heather

Only Exmoor reaches out to bleed the very rain from the sky
To lie seeming gentle with its folds and billows, green fields abutting the heather
Then to gladly accept the gifts of deadly snow, killing floods, baking heat

This poem first appeared in Peacock Journal earlier this year.

Gonzo

June 27, 2017art, beauty, poem, Poetryart, beauty, poem, poetryThe Cheesesellers Wife

Sometimes I get gonzo over words
Or struck on a view, a detail
Sometimes I need to capture the
Moment, view, emotion, ache
Sometimes I’m playing
Like now

Desert sky

May 27, 2017astronomy, beauty, cosmology, Life, nature, poem, Poetry, Science, science poetryastronomy, Blogging, cosmology, Desert, Life, Milky Way, night, poem, poetry, science, science poetry, sky, space, Wadi RumThe Cheesesellers Wife

Driving in a roast red desert
Headlights staring into primeval dark
The untrammeled sky glorious

Above us a bridge of stars
Rivering between rocky horizons
At once near and so very far

Cricking my neck to see
I bounced around the back of the open jeep
Absorbing, amid the shudders, splendor

Star birth and death, worlds hidden by distance
Great glowing nebulae
Fat in the centre, a devouring black hole