Bake-a-yarn: Spring Buds

Thursday 21 March 2024

To dig myself out of this long fallow period

I picked up a poetry book by Billy Collins.

It's not that I don't read any other poet, honestly,

it's just that most contemporary poets are often for me obscure.

I do have to look up the odd word or two of Billy's like burgeoning,

which brought to my mind someone wielding a wooden club

but actually means increasing rapidly

coming from the old french word borjon- as in Spring bud.

And I'm probably thinking of the word bludgeon anyway-

see the difference a letter or two can make in a fallowed mind!

And then there's Billy's references which invariably take me on a google flight,

as with his mention of Saint Denis, the third century Christian martyr.

Did he really pick up his decapitated head and proceed to make a speech

to the motley spectators on that hill in Montmartre?

So by and large, as you see, I get an education or an insight

or a trip down google search and at least feel,

after weeks of being ploughed and harrowed,

the burgeoning desire to sprout something...