Mostly I have been filling the creativity well this month. Sometimes you know something is not ready. You need time to pray at holy wells. Or stare at the birds perching in the sunflowers outside your window. To ponder locked room mysteries and the people inside them. To watch and gather one’s strength for a renewal, or a beginning.

As a child I was a piano scholar, and not a terribly gifted one. Essential piano practice came in the form of a book titled Etudes. They were five finger exercises to limber up the fingers, to get you stoked for the ivory so to speak.

I welcome autumn, the nights drawing in, the soulful click of knitting needles in the evening. It heralds the richest vein for writing. Like mushrooms that have had to follow the long, underground tracks before they can emerge, finally the words begin to pop up and patterns discerned. But start the practice, as Miss Mildred instructed, with the etudes.

 

Out on our lane one September morning

 

Approaching

A humming in the distance

Coming from the south – probably

(But sound carries in odd ways in the country

The wind can play hard and fast)

 

A bee swarm

Of human speech

Rising and falling

Babel bearing down

Upon us

 

All at once

A sound not unlike

Once heard outside a Stamford Hill Hassidic synagogue

Where inside the men

Daven at their prayers

 

Then

Inexorably moving towards me

Coming down the lane

Shaded by its shaggy hedges

The trees

 

A huddle of helmets

A lycra clad choir

Bent double

Constantly chattering

As pedals creaked, gears moaned

 

An all male

Tenor Baritone Bass

Fortissimo

Words spilling

Over each other

 

Then

One broke ranks vocally

Acknowledging me

In passing

Not missing a beat

 

(Also, the day –

How it was good

For drying the washing -)

A throw away line

Fluttering to my feet

 

The peloton rolled past

Pedalling north

Uphill and not so fast

Becoming echoes

Pegged to the washing line

Copyright 2018 Bee Smith