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Hooligan Baby Starlings…. From ‘Emergence’ Magazine…. Once Again – The Clue Is In The Title…..

by Bernie Bell - 11:38 on 19 June 2023

Hooligan Baby Starlings….

We were watching baby starlings, bathing….

 

…and drying off….

And remembered Ted Hughes’ poem…

 

Where I Sit Writing My Letter

Suddenly hooligan baby starlings

Rain all around me squealing,

Shouting how it’s tremendous and everybody

Has to join in and they’re off this minute!

 

Probably the weird aniseed corpse-odour

Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,

As it disturbs me.  Now they all rise

Flutter-floating, oddly eddying,

 

Squalling their dry gargles.  Then, mad, they

Hurl off, on a new wrench of excitement,

Leaving me out.

I pluck apple-blossom, cool, blood-lipped, wet open.

 

And I’m just quieting thoughts towards my letter

When they all come storming back,

Giddy with hoarse hissings and snarls

And clot the top of an ash sapling –

 

Sizzling bodies, snaky black necks craning

For a fresh thrill – Where next?  Where now? Where? –

They’re off

All rushing after it

Leaving me fevered, and addled.

 

They can’t believe their wings.

 

Snow-bright clouds boil up.

 

Ted Hughes

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From ‘Emergence’ Magazine….

Ancestral Structures on the Trailing Edge

by Lauret E. Savoy

Every place, every landscape, is a site of memory and a site of oblivion or erasure.”

Juneteenth has been a day of joy and celebration for African Americans since the late 1800s, and this Monday it will be commemorated in its third year as a federal holiday. As Americans continue to reckon with the legacy of slavery, embedded in the very stone that houses the federal government, we are called to consider how the country’s cultural and historical landscapes both reveal and obscure this institution’s memory. 

From the crest of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, geologist-writer Lauret E. Savoy examines traces of collision, rupture, and erosion—both human and geological—in America’s Chesapeake-Appalachian region. Interrogating the enduring terrains of language and assumptions, she lays bare the process by which colonial lawmakers deliberately constructed the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” to justify the institution of slavery: the beginnings of a legacy still shaping life and identity today. As she uncovers these histories, Lauret illuminates their complex entanglements with her own life, identity, and ancestry, considering how we
re-member our inheritances in landscapes marked by both memory and erasure.”

READ ESSAY

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Once Again – The Clue Is In The Title…..

https://archaeologyorkney.com/2023/06/19/tombs-updates/

The presence of a stalled Cain on Faray, prompts me to post these again…

https://theorkneynews.scot/?s=Faray+Bernie+Bell

The plan has gone quiet – but I don’t believe that it’s gone away. 

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Here’s one I made earlier…. https://theorkneynews.scot/2022/01/15/the-ministry-and-magic-in-early-modern-orkney/

 

 


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