bonfire haiku

It's Bonfire Night in the UK today. People across the country will be lighting bonfires and setting off fireworks. If you are making a bonfire, make sure that no hedgehogs or other animals have made a home in the wood. The best thing is to build the bonfire just before you light it so that you can thoroughly check all the wood. If you're using a fire that you built earlier you need to turn over all the wood carefully to check that nothing is hiding in it. There's good advice here.

If you're setting off fireworks, make sure your pets are indoors, because they can be scared by the loud bangs.

Here are two haiku that I've written about Bonfire night:

sparks fly
from the bonfire -
star filled sky

previously published in Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society


fireworks -
the herring gulls
take flight

Cherry trees

The cherry trees in the garden of the building opposite our flat are temperamental. A couple of years ago they bloosomed twice in one season. This year they stubbornly refused to bloom, even when most of the other cherry trees in Edinburgh had started their belated blooming, most of Spring being late this year.

I went down to Bristol for a few days, saying goodbye to the bare branched cherry trees. But what happened while I was away?

home again -
our cherry trees finally
in blossom.

Rich blossoms pink against the creamy walls of the old school building.

Drought Resistant Strain by Mather Schneider

This excellent poetry collection is conversational in style, sometimes grim but often laced with humour and always with affection for the characters. The poems cast a glance at the difficulties of relationships between humans and of humans with animals and with the wider natural world and many of them are worth reading several times.

We meet the old woman condemned to live in a slum by her daughter who owns the whole block, the former prostitute nervous about her first day’s work as a life model and a novice gardener who injures himself planting squash.

Schneider has a real eye for detail and an ability to link human life with the natural world in ways that perhaps a lot of people don’t find so easy these days. Here’s a selection of quotes to illustrate what I mean.

from Me and Josie Go to the Zoo
The lemurs have more words in common
than we do

from Monday
His face was like a tree knot

from Withdrawal
professors quick-walk
across brick commons dusted red
like old gray birds
that can’t fly.

from We Have Seen it for so Long
the night smashes like shame
against the earth and stars
war in a small boy’s heart

You can read three of Mather's poems on Bolts of Silk, here.


Drought Resistant Strain by Mather Schneider is available from Interior Noise Press.