06 Aug Inviting Bugs & Blossoms Poetry

Has this summer inspired you to write about Bugs & Blossoms?

August arrives after heat, deluge and wind that have driven the insects from the garden and flattened the late flowering meadows. I launched, in May, a Bugs & Blossoms campaign for Waveney & Blyth Arts and a number of events have been held to inspire people to get close to nature, to observe, to learn, to be creative and to care about the insects and wild flowers.

We held a Bugs & Blossoms art exhibition at Palgrave and a bug hunt at Broome Heath.  Nature writer and moth expert, Mark Cocker, led a hunt for moths and people were challenged, on the hottest day of the year, to write haiku with Tim Gardiner at Geldeston.  Maybe something from the news about biodiversity decline, pollinator problems and blooming roadside verges has prompted you to put pen to paper.

Waveney & Blyth Arts is holding a poetry competition and the closing date – 16 August – is approaching fast. You are invited to submit poems that reflect on the bugs & blossoms sharing our planet – for now. Or those that you miss that peppered your childhood. Or the insects that might be left ruling the world in some post climate change scenario. Or the names of lost flowers that spangled the roadsides and meadows before agriculture pushed them to the edge.

Rules of entry, and how to submit your poems, are here:  https://waveneyandblytharts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/WBA-Bugs-and-Blossom-Poetry-Comp-2019.pdf

 

Jos Smith, writer and lecturer at UEA, is ready to make his selection of the top three and the Ferini Art Gallery, Pakefield is booked for the Arts & Eats lunch (17 September) at which the winning poems will be announced and read.

Read on for one of my insect poems:

 

Metamorphosis

I have a fancy for a dual life,

So I can taste the water and the air;

I’d like to try being ugly, overlooked, and where

I can hang out with fishes, frogs and feel

Caress of ripples, share

The bubbled oxygen the diving beetles

Bring, and the sun clear

Through a skin of water.

 

But then – oh joy,

To creep up some tall stem of reed,

Clasp to it under a summer sun;

To shed the damp and blackened me

And there, plant slung,

Unfold a mirror to the sky,

Pump up my wings; to shiver

Out of water and to fly.