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borthwickdave.bsky.social
Lecturer in Environmental Literature at the University of Glasgow's School of Social & Environmental Sustainability: ecopoetry, walking, place - environmental humanities
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last of february, you cannot see the end of it - nothing holding water, everything obscured - even the next month locked down, unclear

1st thing this morning even the sun delicate everything fragile & holding ice lit & stilled on the timer of shadows laid down by the floodplain's woods both shrinking in rhyme with the rise of light

& though planets align the imperatives of the local intervene

& sky at evening all movement - some slurryspreading (too soon after rain) brings shoals of gulls describing half a globe, a small hemisphere of concentration - a red kite moves distantly in its own orbit, a section of sky you hope clears by dusk that you may see an alignment of planets

& gone 6pm still uplight from the gone sun & in the yard winternormal bars of shedlight on pools a blackbird sets up winterspring vantage sings phrases until dark until villlage lights ping on two miles beyond

& you tire of weather warnings & ankle deep mud of the burn running brown with its own banks but a songthrush sings deep in the woods & some creature has been digging in the midden of the gone-cottage throwing up the sole of a child's boot more glass from the end of the ending

& home along flooded backroads water gushing from fields approaching headlamps a radar for pools ahead softening sky pales before it deepens flare of neighbours' movements then as stars break through

& winter winds bring winter thrushes - fieldfares & redwing - who sway in the purple-catkinned alders as the sun goes, but just after dark (3 days later than last year) the peeping sound of oystercatchers newly inland to breed, circling the field then making off downriver

gathering info at low tide, a lumpy sea never really releasing the shore - curlew in number & crushed mussels under yr boots, ringed plover peeking & ducking - you send up mixed flock of pinkfeet & barnacles more than once, with regret, & without choice

& the dawn supports itself with branches, hauling up to fade

1st thing & light snow, pink footed geese move over towards the place the sky is most full

& still easterlies bring bitter winds - mixed group of redwing & starling rise from a faded field, & you play a game of hare-or-molehill with earthy braille near the burn - gapwinged buzzard turns & mewls; along the lane you trip wren sensors & they tick coded warnings length of the sere beech hedge

& round the bowl of the glen ghost of snow (the wind speaks in its language, you can smell its brittle & ruthless wind), by the burn a little egret freezes mid-stride in hope you pass - & like brief weather, you do.

thwarted afternoon with lengthy wait, repair to a lochan to watch tufted ducks & ginger faced wigeon, then back to the wrong answer to the right question

& walk out intermittent slantlight to where the river scours its sandstone bedrock still deepvoiced a week after rains & the bubbling signal of a quadbike then moving sheep from one mudpocked field to another & from a stand of trees on last year's stubble a woodpecker drumming

soft grey of afternoon, winter thrushes always in your peripheral - roaming redwing but no sound from mistle or song - quiet winter curdle of skies, even the bleak rainbows of engine oil in tractor ruts seem seasonal

& as the light bleeds all peripherals are glanced you find a heron gleaming as they would rather not & geese whiffling down to a field near no road the sun rivets flat on the horizon rare evening you see clear across the coast to where skiddaw lies exposed without cloud

& the st brigid's shift goes up a gear walk into sunset rather than dusk between spidersilk of crossed birdsong gilt of evening brushed by dark wings a rook croons quietly but receives reply in an empty park the ghosts of sheep sound of 2 weeks' rain seeping mud transmits a frequency

@thehoursgodsends.bsky.social

& another warning passes & even trees wade, long diversion into rotting light & silvered water; arrive back to a single greylag circling with alarm call, the dry, sharp chalk of the moon

& wraparound grey (wind up testing the wires only recently repaired), corvids swinging around at speed & greylags moving in isobars across a boggy field

& mid-afternoon 2 small hares you have never seen before squeeze through the wire of the paddock & spend time browsing what sparse new growth they can find around the scruffy porous bounds of the garden

& imbolc the creeping light, gone 17.00 still seeping out SW - soon the rooks will start bearing their building fabric - we all turn towards the year ahead slightly & slowly

last of january, 19.00, thin curving spark of the new moon

& backroad errand with roiling skies panning day you cannot rule out pathetic fallacy

& road home between russet glow & thin upland blanket, the night comes with you flitting wing mirrors to rear view

& everything aftermath - the stricken & washed-out, waterlogged land spat at with sleet (wide calls of chainsaws making firewood for season) - folk gesturing & Road Here Closed, standing water, river shifting in high gear, rooks shaking wings wetly, then dark

& the estimated time for restored electricity moves - just after its own deadline - to 23.59 on 27th... appreciate the work of all out there, but sub-zero outside & this is going to get properly rough now...

@thehoursgodsends.bsky.social

morning & all filmed by ice, brash underfoot crunching, headtorch swinging its checks

by headtorch, next book of 2025

& all afternoon you hear loud engines arrive but it is the wind & always the wind look for damage before the sun goes & recheck what's vulnerable an eloquent conversation of hand signals with your neighbour in the lane the wind drives you home to dark windows

eye of the storm, sparrowhawk the middle of its own red warning (electric down before dawn - hunker in as airborne debris reels by windows, even finches have retreated the blast)

& before the storm - you are on the border of amber & red, or so they say - mist rising as light falls (corvids gather & bicker, pheasant roosts in windbreak [venus between powerlines]), you wonder for trees shivering brightly in puddles, climb the hill into cold, then warmth

& all day the sun fog-clagged & small as the moon

& hard to see anything - the towering grey that pinkfooted geese phase through - there are lapwing sounding reedily but you cannot find them deep in dark (a loose sheep watches you try, refuses to enter when you open a gate & stand back)

& wrap of gloom but bright sound - this blackbird all day confused by their need to sing subsong