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Post #139 Wednesday 6 May 2020 – Poplars

May 5, 2020 by MG

Posted in: Adventure, Country, Letters from America, Poetry, River, Sky

Letters from America

Wednesday 6 May 2020

This photo is a bit out of focus and overexposed but your glamorous aunt is doing real yoga.  There are some lovely spots just off the highway to Canberra.  This is one of them, at a rest area commemorating one of the bravest second war VCs, Diver Derrick VC.

Looking up, arms reaching up

In the Iliad there are one or two passages that changed the way I looked at poplars. Everyone knows I love trees. I already loved poplars. But now I love them even more. I have included one of the passages from Homer, which is about the death of a Trojan named Simoeisios. It follows a standard formula: the fall of the warrior in the battle, his precise wound, the story of his humanity, the metaphor.

There Telamonian Ajax
struck down the son of
Anthemion
Simoeisios in his stripling’s
beauty, whom once his
mother
descending from Ida bore
beside the banks of
Simoeis
when she had followed her
father and mother to tend
the sheepflocks.
Therefore they called him
Simoeisios; but he could
not
render again the care of his
dear parents; he was
short-lived,
beaten down beneath the
spear of high-hearted
Ajax,
who struck him as he first
came forward beside the
nipple
of the right breast, and the
bronze spearhead drove
clean through the
shoulder.
He dropped then to the
ground in the dust, like
some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying
about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with
branches growing at the
uttermost tree-top:
one whom a man, a maker
of chariots, fells with the
shining
iron, to bend into a wheel
for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening
by the banks of a river.
Such was Anthemion’s son
Simoeisios, whom
illustrious
Ajax killed.

4.473 – 489

xx from MG


Post #88 Sunday 27 May 2018 – Autumn Japan

May 27, 2018 by MG 6 Comments

Posted in: Adventure, Aesthetics, Letters from America, Travel, Urban landscape

Letters from America

Sunday 27 May 2018

It was another glorious Autumn weekend and I spent this one in the Blue Mountains with an old friend, who lives there with her family.  She is originally from Japan and has christened her neighbourhood Aoyama after an elegant part of Tokyo which has beautiful street trees.  I was probably one week late for the colour this year but even so there were some lovely trees still in the streets round about, including this radiant maple:

And so I have to confide I bought tickets earlier this year to visit Japan at the end of November – which will be their late Autumn.   Anticipation will be intensifying as the year progresses 🙂

MG xx

Post #25 Monday 1 May 2017 – an anniversary

May 2, 2017 by MG Leave a Comment

Posted in: Adventure, Birds, City, Letters from America, Travel, Urban landscape

  Letters from America

Monday 1 May 2017

When 1 May comes around each year I am delighted and surprised every time that I am still living in the light and shiny apartment that I have lived in since 2013.  The lease started on 1 May 2013.

This morning about half an hour or so after dawn I took this snap which records the path of the sun to the city and picks out some autumn colour on the London plane trees in Victoria Street.

I went to the Blue Mountains for the day and there was more autumn colour for me there.  No time to linger at home.  These shots are taken in the garden of my very best Japanese friend, from left to right: maple (with camellia), maple, weeping cherry.  This place is named Aoyama after a fashionable and leafy district in Tokyo.  Aoyama literally means blue mountain in Japanese.

While we sat on the verandah above the garden a very small and brilliant bird came down to feed on the daphne bush already in flower in the shady part of the garden alongside the house.  One of my favourite small birds, it seems to be always wearing a little tuxedo. The Eastern Spinebill, here in a photo I borrowed from the internet.

Such a lovely day really.

Hope you are all travelling well, and that you are visited with that wonderful feeling that comes with routine, day to day, in the details, happiness.

MG xx

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