Midsummer's Eve

Then there is a moment of entering into another’s world.  Bending over the flowerbed to pull out a thistle, a foxglove brushes my face.  Inside the petal I hear legs rasping: a bumblebee so close, it is inside my brain. Swallows and martins swirl above and around me, and so – maestro – I conduct, waving my arms in the air.  The swallows fly with their first brood; the martins still feed their young.  On the shed roof a solitary blackbird taps out a persistent, low-key alarm call.  A horse splutters – it echoes – and from the far trees, unseasonably, the tinny drumming of a woodpecker.   8pm on a perfect midsummer’s evening. The sun is still as high as a winter’s noon and dazzles the lupins, the bruised delphiniums, though the poppies seem merely dazed.  No sound other than the birds and the horse and the distant bleat of a train. Still bright at 10pm: a single thrush, and the sunset.  Stray wisps of pink fanfare the sky. At night, with the window open, I can hear the murmuring of the martins in their nests. 4am and it all begins again.