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Nests clot in the veins
of the tree - the rooks are a
passing infection.

Excerpt from the poem Calendar. Skirrid Hill, by Owen Sheers, published by Seren.
Image © All Rights Reserved www.open-aspect.co.uk

One of my very occasional winter trees series, I probably only manage a couple of these a year.

Skirrid Hill will resume shortly.

Please no banners in your comments, thanks.

Her east-west flanks, one dark, one sunlit,
her vernacular of borders

Excerpt from the poem Skirrid Fawr. Skirrid Hill, by Owen Sheers, published by Seren.
Image © All Rights Reserved www.open-aspect.co.uk

He looks me straight in the eye,
ninety years old.
folded in his favourite chair

and tells me he doesn't want this,
to watch himself die, to have the doctor
plumb any further in the depths of his scarred lungs.

He who himself spent so many years
holding the chests of others to the light
to forecast the storms gathering there,

the squalls and depressions
smudging those two pale oceans,
rising and falling in the rib cage's hull.

Excerpt from the poem The Wake. Skirrid Hill, by Owen Sheers, published by Seren.
Image © All Rights Reserved www.open-aspect.co.uk

As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.

T.S. Eliot, East Coker. From the preface to Skirrid Hill, by Owen Sheers, published by Seren.
Image © All Rights Reserved www.open-aspect.co.uk