Dear friends
I am sitting on the terrace of a gorgeous villa in Speloncato, a hilltop village poised between the mountains and the coastal plain in the Balagne, northern Corsica. In front of me the hill falls away to an area dotted with olive trees surrounding a huge lake. Beyond that is a range of small pointy hills topped with dramatic fortified villages, and beyond them lies the blue Mediterranean. Above my head is…
My readers (if there are any) may be relieved to hear that the muse of poetry has abruptly departed, so what I have to impart today is in prose. But it's not prosaic - it's good news. I had a CT scan last week to assess how well the last six months of chemo had worked on my pesky little lymph nodes, and on Thursday my husband and I went up to the Christie to see my lovely consultant, Dr Saunders.
The scan showed…
Another poem. I promise I'm not resorting entirely to verse. It's just that this poem came instantly. I saw the dead greenfinch, disposed of it, then came upstairs and wrote the poem right away. So it's more free-form than the last one, and more real, perhaps.
Death of a Greenfinch
A greenfinch lay on the patio,
dead.
An inch from his beak was a fig
fallen from the fig tree.
What happened? What caused…
My blog today is a poem which I've been working on for some days (and it's still not finished - the ending is particularly weak). Now, I haven't written any poetry for nearly fifty years, and it's taking me a while to find my voice. I didn't trust myself to free verse - need a bit of structure but not too much - so I chose blank verse for this. It's about the amazing spring we've had and all the wonderful…
Last week I went up to the Christie for a review and what I thought would be my final prescription for Capecitabine. Although I've been suffering a bit lately (mostly from the Mytomycin), I was determined to finish the course. So I was a bit taken aback when the oncologist said categorically that there was no way she'd allow me to continue. My bowel is very inflamed, I've had a bit of a scare with chest pain,…
