We’re on the cusp of summer and spring is painting the trees with its’ special green brush strokes. Fragile and luminescent, a new season with all its’ colours stand before us. Tonight the fires of cleansing will be lit, burning away the sins of a long dark winter. When the ashes cool tomorrow a new generation will feel entitled to the world and a future they won’t think anyone else ever imagined. All hail to the young!
Me? Well, I’m old and tired. In quite a few ways I’m far less than a spent ink cartridge, only filling in half the letters on the page you’ve tried to print. The one you sigh at on a Friday and vow to have replaced by Monday. And I watch the world turning, once again…
Another year gone… Another thirty or so poems exorcised… Another lot of ‘crap, I didn’t get around to reading all of their poems today, will they still read mine?’ or ‘are we all not just going around in one big circle of patting each other on the back…?’. Another few days of ‘no, I can’t write anything today, I have nothing left to give!’ and a few ‘I just have to stop writing now and go to bed… But just one more!’.
The world is green with fresh leaves, with fresh wonders and annoying kids with their sense of entitlement, but the only promise I can make for the upcoming twelve months – as the choirs around the country are singing ‘The winter rushes down from our hillsides’ – is that I’ll try to enjoy the moments I have. And I’ll try to be here again, maybe even before next April?
I’ll try to stay alive. For some of us, that’s really all you can ask.
Hardly a poem, and as it’s not written to prompt I doubt many will read it, but that’s OK. It’s April 30 and the last day of NaPoWriMo 2015. It’s also Walpurgis Night in Sweden, and in about an hour bonfires will be lit to burn winter away in the tradition of spring and drunk teenagers. I have a few regrets over the past month. Poems I didn’t get to read. Poems I read and couldn’t get myself to comment on. Poems I outright didn’t like and the ever-present thought of ‘why can’t people just read what I write because they like it?’. And I shouldn’t have thought that.
I want to thank everyone who’s been around to read and comment over the past month, as well as the websites I’ve used for inspiration, mainly Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie and Magpie Tales, but also The Sunday Whirligig and of course NaPoWriMo. I don’t know if I’ll be back tomorrow or if I’ll be back next year. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back. But I want to thank all of those people who’ve actually spent time reading my scribbles and commenting. I’m sorry if I haven’t returned all the favours…
A Glass of Bubbly 
