Last Day of April
by CBWilliams
Getting used to this being alone required a skill beyond her, she thought. It was on the far side of road, as if the sunny side was always over there—the place she couldn’t get to. Although she’d travelled some distance from the initial grief-pain of death to where she was now—
standing still in her garden listening to the barn swallows Chideep Chideep—
there was a wide gulf between here and there.
She turned the key and went inside.
Purple Parrot Tulip by CBWilliams
April is the favoured month around the cottage Iris lives in, not only because Spring is in the air, but colour too is emerging as the grey veil of winter is drawn aside.
A purple, parrot tulip stands in an ancient Irish medicine bottle found intact in a stone wall around Iris’s cottage. It poses on the lid of an old black Aga.
Everything in Iris’s life needs colour – whether it be the blue bottle she keeps for flowers in the kitchen, or the glazed tiles from Provence above the stove.
Pierre Bonnard wrote: “Colour does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it.” Iris feels this about her life.
This drawing, inspired by David Hockney‘s iPad drawings, celebrates the triad of Spring and colour and life.
Note: Drawing App used is ‘Inspire Pro’.
Come in to the Garden
Quickly now comes the garden.
Every Spring the light surprises.
The way it is suddenly here,
and every door and window seems an invitation
into its light.
The day is awake before you.
The birdsong full of urgency.
The air articulate with elaborate intricacies of notes that are both ancient and new.
How quickly it has happened.
You find yourself in the fast green filling of April.
And you feel: you’ve never quite noticed the light like you do right now.
Stand still.
You might just see the buds bloom.
Soon, like arrows of sunlight, in the open doorway of the stone cabin, past the purple shutters, the starlings will soon swoop.
Silage Bales by CBWilliams
Marching into April
Toora ta loo rye aye.
Beneath the out of season hot blue sky
silage bales sweat, yet sweetly, in their plastic wraps.
Golden gorse scents the air with coconut.
And sheltered in the ivied stone wall
viola odorata and oxalis bloom.
Blackthorn spins its white lace-like blossoms.
While woodbine, downy-leafed twins with everything.
Toora ta loo rye aye
April comes…
There comes a time when balance returns.
The light outside becomes insistent.
The landscape awakens, its urging unquenchable.
Outside under the wooden canopy on the table the unplanted primroses anticipate the gardener who is still inside watching the winter rain easing.
They are looking at each other… she and the bird that has been knocking on the window, and the primroses wait.
“Come out into the garden green with spring…”
As one of the great Irish singer/songwriter sings….
Green is Spring by CBWilliams
“…It’s not easy being green
But green’s the color of spring
And green can be cool and friendly like
And green can be big like an ocean
Or important like a mountain or tall like a tree
When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why
But, why wonder, why wonder?
I’m green and it’ll do fine
It’s beautiful and I think it’s what I want to be…”
The lyrics come from a fellow named Joe Raposo…but the version Iris likes comes from Van Morrison ‘It’s not Easy Bein’ Green’ on Hard Nose The Highway
Kamikaze yellow bird is pecking at the glass, again.
Kamikaze Yellow Bird CBWilliams
For days now he (for it must be a he) has not given up. He continues to fly, crash, peck and tap at the window. Sometimes he sits on the out-door handle. Sometimes he sits on the skylight. He seems a harbinger – but what message does he bring? The tiny smudges on the glass reveal just how intent is the yellow bird. Marks on the window are joining up like a Morse code, but obscuring instead of revealing. Perhaps Windex would deter him.
But never mind, I add his tapping rhythm to the sounds of Spring, to the hum and buzz gathering in the wet Spring air in my back garden.
And,
I am reminded to feed him…
Along the road honeysuckle twins
with ivy.
Birdsong married them today.
Chaucer wrote:
For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
Iris returned from a walk and found flowers waiting in the cabin on the wooden table beside the birdseed and the garden tools. With a card…
Will you be my Valentine?
Here’s Iris Bowen writing about and looking at her garden…
Iris's Garden by CBWilliams
… at its high hedges. Its overgrown lawn. The algae-tinted patio with its myriad planters and containers. At the wild garden she had been cultivating for twenty five years in the middle of the west Clare countryside – the last two on her own. Cultivating wilderness, that’s what she was doing. And sometimes it seemed like madness. Beyond her garden the land was boggy and rush-laden – rushes tall as hazel rods – and full of clay. But inside the fushia hedges, she’d transformed the sticky soil to one that was like loam.
She’d given part of her soul to it.
Adding seaweed gathered off the rocks at Doughmore. Adding leaf mold from the sycamore trees. Adding compost and manure until the blue gley soil turned a rich black and yielded exotics like the Californian tree poppy and Aloe polyphylla. There were three perennial borders and a rose bed that Luke had planted. A box knot garden. All of it sloped down southwards to seek the thin capricious sun that shone in west Clare.
She’d known that garden in all seasons, become acquainted from that April day in 1991 when she and Luke arrived and at first it seemed the brambles owned it…
Whose Woods? by CBWilliams
Whose woods are these where granite glints in white winter light? And whose sugar maples and birch and white oak reflect in mirror-like water?
