brown Thames, choppy underneath the bridge (in faded red and rusted white) above the wide and sweeping bend (by London Eye) clouds rise, a mountain range but moving almost imperceptibly we turn, and out past Tower Bridge the sky is rippled solid grey (a siren scratches electronic fingernails down Blackfriars Road) the water doesn’t lap it slaps the pilings standing still in pairs, truncated now, the sad memorials of former and more elegantly decorative times

I wrote this after the first time I used the station.

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

My favourite tube station.

They mugged the rainbow, left it sprawled across the sea, bleeding on the beach. Its life took years to ebb away, and decades later, from the sea bed where its scattered body was unquietly interred, it rose from time to time to cast bedraggled gulls and terns upon the coast, their feathers slick with black remembrance.

"The S.S. Torrey Canyon".

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #vss365 #undersea

No point tagging @Allianz - they're not on Bluesky.

And Netanyahu; concentrating on bumblingly corrupt Trump tends to let evilly corrupt Netanyahu off the hook.

I don't recognise that - where's it from? Is there a reason he's using baby talk?

The saying is: "the map is not the territory"; omitting the articles is ungrammatical.

Not for me (fingers crossed).

(for M.S. & L.N.) You fled the world’s insanity, but found no balm; your mind had taken up the darkness and become your gaol. Trapped in a patternless, unlighted maze, you wandered, lost, cut off from all the warmth and love around you — turning random corners, turning back, turning hope to hopelessness, you failed to reach the centre or the exit. As the world outside shut down, dividing friend from friend, and isolating those for whom you’d always cared, you found a thread to follow, made your way – despite wrong turns, dead ends – out to the one who’d waited for you, never losing faith, and brought her music, light, and joy again, to ward against the madness of the world.

"Labyrinth" (2020)

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

Acrylics on paper, digitally colour-inverted.

#painting #art #acrylics

St Mary's church, Sledmere, E. Riding of Yorkshire.

#photo #photography #church #font #stainedglass #sledmere #yorkshire

Robert Johnson - Cross Road Blues (take 2, test pressing) YouTube video by Nick Dellow

Robert Johnson - "Cross Road Blues"

#song #blues #deltablues #robertjohnson

Boris Johnson: PM tried to restrict ex-minister's access to intelligence Boris Johnson says it is

Are Cabinet ministers vetted? I hadn't thought so. Johnson was the subject of (surely justified) mistrust, though.

To make it impossible to measure out from a wall, down from a ceiling, or up from a floor. It's a multi-purpose space.

Trio Mandili - Silaghev gulisa (Brightness of the heart) YouTube video by Trio Mandili

Trio Mandili - "Silaghev gulisa" ("Brightness of the Heart")

#song #georgiansong #georgianmusic

Bravo! But would this work better at the end?

"So make us both a brew, but please
don't overfill the kettle."

Mile Marbhaisg Air a'Ghaol (Sileas) (1990) YouTube video by Gammaldans

Sileas - "Mile Marbhaisg Air a'Ghaol"

#song #scottishsong #gaelicsong #traditionalsong #waulkingsong

graft line from “Family Zooms” (excerpt from “Earth Gates”) Mary Buchinger, in Talking River Review 54, 2023) only clouds and yachts can scud, white on azure with the wind. I cannot scud — I tug, breeze-prodded, motionless, my strings a-dangle, caught like a kite in a tree, caught like a parrot fish on tentacles that trail below a lion’s mane, caught like a linnet carolling despair upon a birdlimed twig, caught like a breath that strains and wheezes at the chase’s end.

39. "Elemental"

from "Hard Graft on the Half Shell", a sequence of poems grown around one-line grafts taken from other poets' poems.

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #hardgraft #talkingriverreview
@mebuchinger.bsky.social

Acrylics on paper.

#painting #art #acrylics

Blossom at Castle Howard Arboretum, N. Yorkshire, in late March: i. & ii. rhododendrons; iii. Flowering cherry; iv. Berberis.

#photo #photography #arboretum #rhododendron #cherryblossom #berberis #botany #blossom #yorkshire

Will do. (I used always to finish a book, however little I was enjoying it,* but I now give up occasionally. I've just done that on a Melanie Rawn novel.)

*I've only ever once destroyed books rather than passing them to a charity shop: John Norman's Gor novels...

Two days ago:

"Gaza City this evening"

مدينة غزة هذا المساء

(SND News)

Yes; I must get that toe looked at.

'Hospitals recorded 8 deaths over the past 24 hours, incl. 7 newly killed & 1 body recovered from the rubble, alongside 24 wounded.

Since the October 11 "ceasefire", officials say 773 people have been killed & 2171 wounded. Rescue teams have also pulled 761 bodies from beneath collapsed buildings.'

The only famous person I've been mistaken for was John Lennon -- which was similarly off target. (Fortunately Yoko Ono realised her mistake pretty quickly.)

Huge nostalgia for the Routemaster...

Oddly, I've not read this trilogy, perhaps his best-known work, though I love everything else that I've read of his. I'm just finishing "2312"; after that, I'll get hold of "Red Mars" and see what I think.

The opening reminded me of a more conventional Third Ear Band. I must look into this band; odd that I'd never come across them before.

Only for people with smartphones?

The human cost of the war in Sudan, three years on The conflict, which erupted in 2023, has left behind a human toll which is "simply staggering", reports the BBC's Barbara Plett Usher.

The world is failing Sudan.

The world’s largest humanitarian crisis remains desperately underfunded, while the war is fuelled by an ongoing flow of foreign‑manufactured weapons and military equipment – including some originating in the EU and the UK.