Happy Easter

Cuckoos by Andrew Young

When Coltsfoot withers and begins to wear

Long silver locks instead of golden hair,

And fat red catkins from black poplars fall

And on the ground like caterpillars crawl,

And bracken lifts up slender arms and wrists

And stretches them, unfolding sleepy fists,

The cuckoo in a few well-chosen words

Tell they give Easter eggs to the small bird

Easter Blessings to you all, though mine will come from the Celtic tradition and not the symbolic hanging of Jesus.  Tis the time of year that we should be guilty according to the priests.  

Amongst all the frippery of Easter eggs, bunnies and yellow chicks, we should be sad that the natural world declines, the cuckoos slowly fading into extinction as the birds of the meadow do.  The rich harvest of wild flowers no longer exist in the fields - we have tamed the land but at what cost?

“The oaks stand - quite still - so still that the

 lichen loves them...such solace and solitude

 seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted...it

 is necessary to stay in it like oaks to know it.

 (1884)”

 
― Jefferies Richard 1848-1887, The Life of the Fields, by Richard Jeffries ..

Richard Jeffries captured the sheer beauty of the Wiltshire Downs and wrote his heart out at the beauty all round him I shall return to his books soon although it is a sad recollection of what there once was.

But enjoy this Easter weekend and I leave a picture of another famous flower of late spring - the tulip, exotically coloured because of the 'mosaic virus' but beautiful.