Whispers in the Grass
July 2019
These hills,
Buttress the sky,
Green mounds echo the sky,
Draw rain into this deep valley,
Its thirst.
Part of the BM125 project involved taking ideas about the Collections back into the landscapes a lot of those collections came from. In July, as one of our public events, Creeping Toad teamed up with Borderland Voices to host a poetry and art day at the Dove Valley Centre in the Upper Dove Valley fitting the day into the Buxton Fringe Festival
26 people joined us for a day of walking and wandering, scribbling ideas, sharing words, creating pictures and eating cake. We didn’t tie the day to any particular artefacts but drew upon the historic landscapes of the Moorlands and poems unfolded about the flowers we met, the drystone walls and the agricultural history of the area. The clear night-time skies over the dales inspired solar system pictures while other people focussed in to capture the flowers of traditional haymeadows.
Poems from the day are being posted on the Creeping Toad blog and some of the shorter pieces, especially the riddles, will be logged onto the Wonders of the Peak app to tempt people out walking to create their own
Rock-weigher,
Field-ruler,
Bone-layer,
Stone-shepherd*
Have a go yourself?
A quick haiku activity: go outside and sit down on the ground if you can. There, a) look at the sky above, b) touch the ground below, c) reflect on how these sensations make you feel. Turn those three thoughts into 3 lines. You might use the syllable convention ( 5 syllables, 7 then 5 again) but you don’t have to! Go for short, clear images and hold onto room to breathe….(Looking up, reaching down are a good pair of sensations, you could use others!)
Two haiku:
Whispers in the grass
Little rustles through small stems
Wind flowing freely
Performance begun
Wind playing its instruments
Grass whispers softly
Thanks to our Whispers poets and artists
The opening poem is by Mary King,
for the others we haven’t got notes of the poets names!
*answer: drystone waller
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