Wordsmith

What an evocative word. It immediately conjures up the likes of Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and to a lesser extent, Mary Webb, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and many others who are favourites of mine.

I have written recently of my creative instincts having fallen into the gutter and laid there maudlin and stunned. I don't know what to write about. I am rather in one of those "don't care" periods where the problems of everyday life suffocate me. I think I need to get out and "touch base" with the natural world. To walk away the cares and worries, to notice the things that really matter, to have the opportunity to let my thoughts run where they will instead of being on the same everyday treadmill.

We awoke to a smattering of snow again this morning and a bone-rending cold which made going for a walk a very unattractive proposition, so I have been idle, and must confess to reading and sewing this morning . . .

Let me share one of Mary Webb's haunting poems with you, written the year my father was born . . .

A NIGHT SKY

The moon, beyond her violet bars,
From towering heights of thunder-cloud,
Sheds calm upon our scarlet wars,
To soothe a world so small, so loud.
And little clouds like feathered spray,
Like rounded waves on summer seas,
Or frosted panes on a winter day,
Float in the dark blue silences.
Within their foam, transparent, white,
Like flashing fish the stars go by
Without a sound across the night.
In quietude and secrecy
The white, soft lightnings feel their way
To the boundless dark and back again,
With less stir than a gnat makes
In its little joy, its little pain.