seasons – Page 3 – Hues of Hankinson

The Four Last Songs. Music and Chaos.

A cadenza shrill and sharp

Pizzicato from the harp

Andante and legato

Swan song from the cello.

Clefs, chords and counterpoint

From fiery exposition to development

Magnificent muti-tonal orchestration

Tumultuous recapitulation.

Finally four last songs

Lamenting loss, lyrical and forlorn

Musical maverick Strauss is gone

The garden mourns.

This is for Real Toads, where the theme is Chaos. Bjorn talked of physics and mathematics, and it brought me round to music. Music is very mathematical and can be very precise and beauty and precision is borne from weaving together many delicate strands. It reminded me of two great twentieth-century composers who pushed music to its chaotic and mathematical limits. Alban Berg and Richard Strauss. Alban Berg’s Violin concerto is a masterpiece of mathematical precision, but I opted for Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The final line is from these and is the first line of September, written by Hermann Hesse.

These are my late September images…

Last day of September.

Raucous russet leaves

Brambles burgeoning with berries

Onset of October.

Sunrise earlier this week and trees and berries today, perhaps a little hopeful on “burgeoning” These are my small things. They make my world spin. I am linking this to real toads midweek challenge.

Summer sleeps…

Hibernating hedgehogs

Slumbering squirrels

Luscious leaves crunch beneath my feet

As autumn prevails

Ochre turns to burgundy

Mist upon the hills

Children wrapped up snuggly

To keep them safe from seasonal chills.

This is for d’Verse meeting at the bar… is the season where many creatures are going to sleep for the winter- the trees were amazing today-but I only had my cellphone to get photos with…. I wanted to feel justified in my choice of burgundy….

The colour of a single moment….

For me, I find that I like to capture a moment. It is like taking a photograph, I want to make it three-dimensional and breathe life into it. It can be any moment, it can be a moment that exists has existed or a created imaginary moment. The moment can be characterised by a sound, an image, a feeling, and the poem grows from that moment.

I also like to play with words, I see it is a challenge. I guess it is like playing music, I enjoy it immensely, making the images and playing with the words and sounds. Tonight the sunset was bright orange. It was truly amazing, this was the moment- it was burnished orange. It became a Haiku because tonight was haibun Monday. I didn’t think I would get home in time to get a photo, but I just caught the last traces of it.

Bright orange sunset

Burnished embers summer sun

Harvest moon leaves fall.

This is for d’Verse Haibun Monday.

Best of the bay today…

Shipwreck in the sand

Rare beauty beyond the blue

See Autumn falter.

Back to school blues….

Early morning indigestion

Motorway congestion

Students fully of germs and bugs

Too much work and brain fug

Brow burns

Streaming snot

Sore throat

Head hot

Wake up feeling dreadful

First cold of the season

Grateful it is weekend

And I don’t have to pretend or reason

With unruly students, pesky pests,

Procrastinators, sharp-cornered desks

Eager beavers and teacher pleasers.

Sat in bed instead with TV and Maltesers.

Pass the tissues, please. XXX

©Alison Jean Hankinson

Fire burns at back of throat

I’ve got the lot

Changing Seasons…

Winsome wind

Lifting leaves

From autumn trees.

Gusty squalls

Across the reach

Hearty waves crash on a windswept beach.

Stormy days unease

September’s short reprise

Before relentless chill of winter.

©Alison Jean Hankinson

As summer gives way to Autumn and we near the Fall equinox this seems to be the right poem for d’Verse open link night. Soon be out in those wellies crunching the fallen leaves…

Prunella preferred pugs…..

Prunella preferred pugs

As a matter of fact

Not cats

All whiskers and fur and sitting on laps

Not for her.

Prunella preferred pugs

Snug as a bug in a rug

with her dog in a shrug

By the fireside.

In the winter.

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The image is from pixabay and is free to use.

And the band played on…

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English summers wouldn’t be the same

If families didn’t enjoy fun in the sun

Carnival queens and burger vans

Seaside singalongs and festival fun.

We went to the Morecambe Carnival

With bagpipes and drums on hand

The parade moved stately down the prom

To the sound of the big brass band.

Seagulls on standby to have a feast

Candyfloss and greasy chips on the ground

The Bay belting out across the stage

And fairground rides spinning teenagers around

Toploader took to the stage

Boogie-Storm boogied on down

Sandcastle competitions throughout the day

Magical show-stopping firework display at sundown.

English summers wouldn’t be the same

If families didn’t enjoy fun in the sun

Carnival queens and burger vans

Seaside singalongs and festival fun.

So tonight it is Magic over at dVerse

My magic in this is a bit like Puff the magic dragon…

“Oh I do like to be beside the seaside…”

Yes I know I always have seagulls and chips…perhaps it is my signature…

September Sundown at Dallam Park

It was a beautiful Saturday up on the Solway Firth with my dad, there was a slight hint of “autumn” in the early morning and early evening, but a lovely sense of sun and summer still in the air. I drove up to spend the day with dad and we played around with telescopes and binoculars on the estuary, watching herons and swans and other local bird life.

Driving home, still keen to squeeze the last moments out of a beautiful late summer day I came off the motorway a couple of junctions early at Crooklands so I could drive down the A6 to see if the deer were close to the river at Dallam Park. A perfect time of day to see the sun shining through the branches along the riverbank. I wasn’t able to stop to take pictures so have had to use one I took up in Scotland on August Bank Holiday weekend. It felt like the last of the summer sun and by the time I had got home there was a chill in the air.

Twilight sun shimmer

Deer grazing by the river

Sense of Autumn chill.

Today the prompt for dVerse Haibun Monday is komorebi which means sun that shines through the branches.

The feature image was taken at Threave just over a week ago, the other picture is of Dallam park, the deer shed is very near the river and the deer often congregate here. The image was labelled for reuse under creative commons- © Copyright Karl and Ali and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.