The Round (Recycling Series #4)

Recycling doesn't get more organic than this sculpture made of discarded roof slates piled together in the shape of a ball. It's about waist high, and it sits in the part of J's garden that's a wildflower meadow. It's covered in moss and lichen and is home to solitary bees, spiders and many other insects. It was also visible from here.

Please look closer to enjoy the detail. Our friends return from holiday tonight. I hope you've enjoyed your visits to this remarkable garden as much as I've enjoyed blipping them for you.

Stanley Kunitz, one of my favourite poets and a keen gardener himself, would have loved this place.


The Round

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
"Light splashed . . ."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

~ Stanley Kunitz