I have a vivid memory of my father asking me to cut the bluebells back in his garden. I didn’t use sheers, I pulled the dead stems - which came out easily - and some of the leaves came off too. He was furious and said they wouldn’t grown as well the next year.
We have too many bluebells in our garden. They get everywhere. And every year when they’ve finished flowering I pull them out. And every year there are even more bluebells than the year before, and this is despite my throwing out the bulbs that I find when I’m digging.
Yesterday I thought I’d use sheers to do the job, and it was going well. But something snagged, and a wounded a toad crawled out.
It was bleeding on the shoulder, and crawled away, and I was really sad. If I had pulled instead of cut, I wouldn’t have hurt the toad.
It made me think if this poem by Philip Larkin.
2 comments:
Oh sue! I feel like I want that tattooed on my forehead: We should be careful of each other, we should be kind while there is still time...
Larkin has written some poignant lines here and in many of his poems. It is intriguing to juxtapose these with what we have have read from from biographies etc! A very fine poet indeed.
Ana
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