At The Brink Of Night – Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

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My room and this distance,
awake upon the darkening land,
are one. I am a string
stretched across deep
surging resonance.

Things are violin bodies
full of murmuring darkness,
where women’s weeping dreams,
where the rancor of whole generations
stirs in its sleep . . .
I should release
my silver vibrations: then
everything below me will live,
and whatever strays into things
will seek the light
that falls without end from my dancing tone
into the old abysses
around which heaven swells
through narrow
imploring
rifts.

“You are forsaken,” say the anemones.

“I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

― Henry David Thoreau

I ought not to be writing this, because academic deadlines are looming. But I’m seeing many beautiful wildflowers coming into show. I feel compelled to make a note.

Imagine it is still early Spring. Picture a wood anemone in flower, if you will. And now a quivering constellation of them, and an overwhelming sense of wonder when gazing at these seemingly fragile starbursts just above the field layer of a temperate woodland. A light breeze blows in from a mild front and they sparkle in the morning dew. Ah, the glory.

“You are forsaken,” say the anemones, so penned the floriographers of the Language of Flowers. But how can I associate emotional abandonment with Anemone nemorosa? They light up my world every Spring. The Victorians must have this all wrong.

Fast forward to May. This is the time when the opportunity for pollination is done, flowers tarnish and petals shrivel to dust. The flowers are “going over,” as we say, euphemistically. Oh, the disappointment, the grief.

But I propose there’s nothing “over” about the incredible evolution of double fertilization in angiosperms (flowering plants). Why defuse this kind of beauty with a terminal phrase like “going over”? The essence of flower, surely, includes what happens next. It may not be so sensuous to the body, but it’s certainly a wonder to the mind. The process is nothing short of a miracle.

We photographers, artists and writers are culpable. Maybe it’s harder to convey this kind of radiance, the consciousness of life growing in the botanical ovary. Ah, the poetry of the dainty flower, the blousy show, the sexy colours and forms that attract us almost as much as the bees themselves! I’m unconvinced we are even any good at culturally admiring our own mode of pregnancy ~ there’s a lot of goo involved, for sure.

Wood anemones lie dormant for most of the year, spreading out slowly via rhizomes just under the surface of the humous at a rate of about 6 feet per century. I know one patch in North Herefordshire around 600 by 300 feet, so on loose calculation, these plants have been resident since the last ice-age.

Here’s the rub. Pollination fails, often, because the plant is an obligate outcrosser ~ explored not least by Charles Darwin himself, and defining the trait for pollination from spatially widespread populations in order to successfully produce genetically resilient seed. Woodland fragmentation in the UK means this process becomes less and less likely to succeed. The creeping rhizomes secure survival of the species instead. Seeds have almost been forsaken. So, it pains me to say, perhaps the Victorians were right all along.

(returns to study)

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Hay Bluff

Sunlight spins a web on broader shoulders
of velvet age and greening consciousness.
We are where flocks drift as light snow
eddies in uneasy breath; climb

a leeward beat, where pitted turf
and splits of youngish river
twist and rip the ankle; hear
the clear spring and a forceful breeze

through scentless heather.
These dry stone pens have crumbled
since the trees were felled
and stock set free to roam

and they goad our heavy step.
So we wait in peat for fatter Cornish air,
flecked with steel and seams of coal
and cockles, cast in brackish inlets.

Deed lands press, as early bursts of May
ignite the ancient lanes,
that siphoned off a legacy
to war and wage and cynic’s ploy.

Some will tire of contest,
and the Bluff will take them back
with umbilical flex and canopy
or bookish appetite.

Now cirrus spells a warmer front,
and we may think to return home
before consensus throws us
into null and looming shadow.

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‘Hay Bluff’ Ginny Battson © May 2012

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Around 55.8 million years ago, huge quantities of carbon dioxide were suddenly released into the atmosphere, and temperatures climbed around 5°C. No-one knows exactly why. Vulcanism, wildfires, & feedback loops of methane on the sea-floor released & CO2 from melting permafrost on top? Extinctions quadrupled, global migrations exploded, intense storms raged and lasted for over 1000 years at a time.

This period is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and has been the most rapid rise in CO2 release, ocean acidification and global temperature range ever recorded in science…. until now.

We’re beating it.

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