Tag Archives: heat

Poetry Challenge #45 – Summer Storm

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Photo ©Fir0002 via Wikimedia Creative Commons

Photo ©Fir0002 via Wikimedia Creative Commons

Jane Dougherty posts regular poetry challenges, using different forms – this week it is a rondelet, and the theme is ‘Summer Storm’.

A rondelet, if you’re unsure (and I was), is a poem of seven lines, where the first, third and seventh line repeat, the second, fifth and sixth lines rhyme, and the fourth line rhymes with one, three and seven. Got that? Also, lines one, three and seven have four beats, whereas the remaining lines have eight. Sounds complex but, once you give it a try, it’s quite a nice simple structure. Here’s my effort:

Summer Storm

The air lies warm,

Summer sweat beading your pale skin,

The air lies warm.

Lightning paints lines across your form;

Thunder crashes, heavenly din,

Breeze cool against our heated skin.

The air lies warm.

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If you’d like to give the rondelet form a try, head over to Jane’s blog and leave your link in the comments.

It’s A Hot One

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Well, it’s not exactly England… but it could be

It’s hot.

It’s wonderfully, sunnily, bees-buzzing-mightily, hot. Get-your-sunglasses, tie-a-hankie-on-your-head, hot.

This is an unusual thing for the UK, in case you’re wondering. It’s an opportunity to be grabbed by both hands and enjoyed, as it may be taken from us without warning, not to return until July, or even August, of next year. There is plenty of joking about it, that this week is all the summer we are going to have, even though certain of the papers, as they do every year, are predicting a six-week ‘heatwave.’  Who knows? This time next week I could be back in my winter coat, as I was three weeks ago. The vagaries of weather on this small green island have made us a nation hopeful and resolute: ‘It’ll clear later,’ ‘blue sky over there,’ ‘mustn’t grumble‘.

So on days like this, when the scent of rose and hawthorn and honeysuckle fill the air, when bare arms and legs are kissed with Riviera-like heat, we enjoy. When it’s warm enough to walk up to school in the morning without a jacket, to sit outside for an evening meal, to keep the blinds closed in an effort to keep the heat out, we revel.

And a few months from now when the nights draw in, cold with frost, we’ll remember. And we’ll hope once more, looking forward to when summer comes again.

An Observation, Part 5 – A Glimpse of Snow

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It was a hot Melbourne day, the kind where the air is heavy and damp before 9am, holding the city hostage until a cool change blows in from the west. I was waiting for a train at one of the red brick rail stations so ubiquitous in the inner city, federation bungalows and Victorian houses backing onto the tracks. If it weren’t for the prickly pear and palm trees lining the embankments and the sticky, overbearing heat, you could almost be in old England, wrought iron arches and curving brickwork evoking somewhere half a world away. Perhaps that was what they wanted, the architects of this city by the bay – a reminder of faraway home.

I sat on a bench in the shade as I waited for my train to arrive, fanning myself with my hand, though all it did was move the warm air around. The platform was almost deserted. The only other occupant was a tiny old lady with a wrinkled face and improbably black hair, dressed in dark layers that looked stifling in the heat, her small feet stuffed into black shoes. She came to sit next to me and I smiled at her. She smiled back, flash of bright eyes in her lined face.

‘Hot day,’ she said, her strongly accented English betraying her European roots.

I nodded. ‘Sure is.’

‘Where you from?’ she said, lifting her chin at me.

‘Canada,’ I said. It was my answer at the time, my most recent address before coming to Melbourne, the twang in my voice giving me away.

‘Ohh,’ she said, nodding. ‘It’s cold there. Lots of snow.’

I think I said something about how nice it would be to have some snow as we both wilted in the heat, air shimmering on the tracks nearby.

She agreed then leaned in, as though about to share a confidence.

‘When I was a little girl in Italy, we sometimes have snow. Not very often, but I remember one time when I was at school. Our classroom had a balcony with big doors and we all ran out to touch the snow as it fell. When the teacher called us back in, we threw snowballs at her.’

Then she giggled, her legs swinging back and forth like the little girl she used to be, transporting both of us back to a place where snow fell and children laughed. Eventually the train came and we both went on to our destinations – I never saw her at the station again. But I always remembered her story, the small glimpse she gave a stranger of snow on a hot day.

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