Fading away

Fading away

The days have come of obscurity,
of sun too bright to see the shadows,
shadows too deep and black,

and the nightingales sing too loud, the nights,
to hear the small things rustling.

The grass has grown too high to see the meadow beneath,
the pink and white and yellow, cross-hatched with waving stalks,
and the sky is flat as a silver plate, a lake of shining steel.

There is too little that we see, perceive, in this tangle of things,
how this year’s nests are fewer than the last,
the fox no longer watches with her cubs at the meadow’s edge,
and we are silent now before the setting of suns.

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Author: Jane Dougherty

I used to do lots of things I didn't much enjoy. Now I am officially a writer. It's what I always wanted to be.

26 thoughts on “Fading away”

    1. I think that’s true.
      Not summer yet. We had a very scary episode on the 19th when we had such heavy rain the little stream flooded and became a violent torrent. It derailed a high speed train down in the town. We had a broad river racing past the house, just 20m away from the front, and the rainwater pouring off the fields flowing all round the house. And coming inside, of course!

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      1. Oh no! That sounds terrible. How much came inside? Did you have things ruined? And that train! Were people killed?

        Fortunately, we did not have any damage. I know there was the usual flooding in some areas. We had wild thunderstorms and a not too far away a tornado touched down and in another place something called a “gustnado.” Now we’re just having days of rain and cold for this time of year.

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      2. It sounds as though we are having the same kind of upset weather. Just that yours is more extreme!
        We didn’t take much notice of the storm at first. There’s always water comes in round the window frames and we put floor cloths down to pop it up. Then water started to run into the barn. That often happens too, rain water racing down the track from the lane and straight under the barn door. I was in the kitchen getting supper ready; and my eye was caught by rapid movement outside, like animals running really fast parallel with the house. Looked again and saw that the animals were tree branches and the whole of the lower meadow was like a river, with waves on it! The fields higher than the house were just pouring torrents onto the lane, great orange cascades of muddy water. The stream that flooded ends up in the Garonne, and there the flooding was bad. Luckily for the people in the train, it can’t go very fast on our line and it was flagged down by local people. By the time it got to the hole in the tracks, it was breaking hard. Nobody was even hurt, but 500 people had to be housed for the night in the community centre. They haven’t got the train off the line yet. They’re having to take the engine up the line to Toulouse, and the rest of the passenger end to Bordeaux, once they’ve heaved in back onto the tracks. The climate and human activity are going to kill us all!

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      3. Wow–a scary time! I can’t imagine seeing that water with waves in the field. I hope you didn’t have much damage. Yes, the weather seems crazy everywhere.

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      8. The weather this spring has been a roller coaster. It’s dry, breezy and only warm, but by Friday it’s going to be height of summer temperatures, mid-90s. The another whopper of a storm, and more rain.

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