The dappled river      Babbles the sound of sunshine      To its pebbled bed

     The Girl in the Orkney Island Gift Shop.     Thick plaited pigtails,     Blonde.     Mid-calf boots,     Elk-skin.     Looking soft to touch,     Yet strong.     Wearing a woollen skirt,     Flouncy,     Fair Isle jumper,     Woven tights,     Saucy smile.     The blue sea, stolen from the fjord,     Lived within her eyes     And the mountain snows     Were her complexion.     She might have leaped     From a Viking longboat     Into the gift shop     On Orkney Island

Ginny Tickler -  England 1943 She had a wheelbarrow A plain square box With long wooden handles And bicycle wheels. She had a beautiful face and a woolly hat. Fourteen, sweet, innocent and mute. In the words of the era, She was not all there. She collected vegetable parings A war-time measure to feed pigs. When she saw children playing She would stop and wait and smile.   Always on the edge, looking through An invisible curtain at a fairy story. Boys would tease though not hurtfully. The girls would say, ‘No! Leave her alone’. They understood more. Once only, I touched her finger tip Through a sheet of glass.

All the Times and Moods of One Good Place A walk down Low Burgage at Winteringham can gain access to thebanks of the upper reaches of the Humber Estuary. In spring, as you leave the houses behind to go ‘down water’, you find yourself in an arch of blackthorn blossom on either side of the lane. A few weeks later you can become almost drunk with the smell from the elder blossom bushes that grow intermittently by the wayside.    Mounting the raised path by way of a kissing gate (the village is heir to legacy of footpaths), you see a score and a half of small boats stranded on the muddy banks of Winteringham Haven and, on a windy d

A Palaeolithic Survivor Mankind is the only animal I can think of who has the effrontery to imagine that it has a divine right (I use the word 'divine' advisedly - look up Genesis 1.28 if you don't believe me) to ride on another creature's back. I'm thinking particularly of the horse, the chief target of this delusion, though there other species similarly afflicted by it. The horse is too reasonable an animal, too obliging. Good qualities, you may think, but nevertheless the cause of its enslavement. When I mention this to people there is always one who will tell me that but for man's interest the animal would have become extinct. Tell that

Ginny Tickler -  England 1943 She had a wheelbarrow A plain square box With long wooden handles And bicycle wheels. She had a beautiful face and a woolly hat. Fourteen, sweet, innocent and mute. In the words of the era, She was not all there. She collected vegetable parings A war-time measure to feed pigs. When she saw children playing She would stop and wait and smile.   Always on the edge, looking through An invisible curtain at a fairy story. Boys would tease though not hurtfully. The girls would say, ‘No! Leave her alone’. They understood more. Once only, I touched her finger tip Through a sheet of glass. And loved her acro