Morning meditations, in a foggy kilkenny landscape
Nikon D200, 50mm f1.4 lens, iso 1600
Fog over a Kilkenny Farm
Kilkenny Landscape Photography : Nigel Borrington
Morning meditation
I find nothing to fill the emptiness,
Of a very cold grey moment
In the endless time of my waking up attempts,
When feeling is painful and the morning is fogged,
Time comes and goes as I try to understand,
Understanding becomes big, huge as a true thing can be,
Truth is relative they say,
Points of view and ways to see,
Interacting is so self defined,
Perceptions float when empty seems deathlike,
Silence in and out is not necessarily peace,
Nothing is rational in a sleepy fogged mind,
But the sun has no fault for this,
So,
I decide to get up from my warm bed,
In a fogged, cold, grey and empty morning,
Carry on my sleepy, fogged mind,
With the conviction this certainly is a different day.
By : Mirela Kapaj
Rosebuds of May
Nikon D700, 50mm f1.4 lens
White rosebuds and flowers
Landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
I love this time of year, our hedgerow is coming alive with all kinds of life, these white wild roses are just one wonderful example.
Nikon D700, 50mm f1.4 lens
White rosebuds and flowers
Landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
When these Roses come out each year they are always wonderful to look at but they last such a short time, I would love it if they flowered all summer…
A Poem by :Robert Herrick
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he’s a-getting
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer:
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.
Then, be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
Nikon D700, 50mm f1.4 lens
White rosebuds and flowers
Landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
Nikon D700, 50mm f1.4 lens
White rosebuds and flowers
Landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
The Lake (Edgar Allan Poe)…
Fujifilm X100
The Vee – Clogheen, Tipperary
Irish landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
The Lake
In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide earth a spot
The which I could not love the less —
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that tower’d around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody —
Then — ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight —
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define —
Nor Love — although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining —
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.
Edgar Allan Poe’s poem: The Lake
Sunday
Fujifilm X100
Hills above the Nire Valley
Landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
Sunday into Monday, the weekends fading light!
A Poem:
Dissolve
feelings fade
like the dull horizon
diminished by the sun
shades of orange
slowly turn dark
and bare themselves
like starlight
to the evening skyline
and the constant clamour of the countryside
decrescendos
into the babbling brook
and soft chirps of frogs
until once again
sleep comes
and a new morning
brings different light
Kassel D “and the constant clamour of the countryside”
Misty Monday
Canon G1x
Landscape photography : Nigel Borrington
Misty Morning
In the misty morning
before the sun begins to rise
the world seems at peace with itself
right before our eyes.
No raised voices
to spoil our waking day,
just a sheltered silence
and the world seems
a million miles away.
In the misty morning
before the sun begins to rise.
David Harris
That Misty Monday feeling, you know you have to get going but that track looks really misty on a Monday morning!
So a poem then !
I walk at the lands edge
Nikon D700
Poem by : Kathleen Jamie
I walk at the land’s edge,
turning in my mind
a private predicament.
Today the sea is indigo.
Thirty years an adult –
same mind, same
ridiculous quandaries –
but every time the sea
appears differently: today
a tumultuous dream,
flinging its waves ashore –
Nikon D700
Nothing resolved,
I tread back over the bog
– but every time the bog
appears differently: this evening,
tufts of bog-cotton
unbutton themselves in the wind
– and then comes the road
so wearily familiar
the old shining road
that leads everywhere
Nikon D700
.
Empty Old Houses.
Fuji Film X100
By : David Whalen
Empty old houses can talk…
But one must know how to listen…
to hear them
Empty old houses have stories…
But one must be eager to listen…
to hear them
Empty old houses can suffer..
But one must have empathy …
To feel it
Empty old houses can feel pain
But one must be able to bear it …
To feel it
Empty old houses have memories
But one must believe … that they have…
To share them
Empty old houses contain people’s lives
But one must believe…that they do…
To share them
Empty old houses can seem dead and deserted
But one must know that they’re not..
To know them
Empty old houses can teem with life’s pleasures
But one must walk through
to sense the aura of life
Empty old houses abound in life’s treasures
But one cannot help but…
To admire them
Train to Dublin
– Louis MacNeice
Nikon Fm2n
Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens
Kodak film
Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps
Against the basic facts repatterned without pause,
I can no more gather my mind up in my fist
Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass –
This is the way that animals’ lives pass.
The train’s rhythm never relents, the telephone posts
Go striding backwards like the legs of time to where
In a Georgian house you turn at the carpet’s edge
Turning a sentence while, outside my window here,
The smoke makes broken queries in the air.
The train keeps moving and the rain holds off,
I count the buttons on the seat, I hear a shell
Held hollow to the ear, the mere
Reiteration of integers, the bell
That tolls and tolls, the monotony of fear.
At times we are doctrinaire, at times we are frivolous,
Plastering over the cracks, a gesture making good,
But the strength of us does not come out of us.
It is we, I think, are the idols and it is God
Has set us up as men who are painted wood,
And the trains carry us about. But not consistently so,
For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in trains,
The idol living for a moment, not muscle-bound
But walking freely through the slanting rain,
Its ankles wet, its grimace relaxed again.
Poem by : Louis MacNeice
Full version of the Poem
The Sea
The sea is a hungry dog,
Giant and grey.
He rolls on the beach all day.
With his clashing teeth and shaggy jaws
Hour upon hour he gnaws
The rumbling, tumbling stones,
And ‘Bones, bones, bones, bones! ‘
The giant sea-dog moans,
Licking his greasy paws.
And when the night wind roars
And the moon rocks in the stormy cloud,
He bounds to his feet and snuffs and sniffs,
Shaking his wet sides over the cliffs,
And howls and hollos long and loud.
But on quiet days in May or June,
When even the grasses on the dune
Play no more their reedy tune,
With his head between his paws
He lies on the sandy shores,
So quiet, so quiet, he scarcely snores.
The sea is a hungry dog,
Giant and grey.
He rolls on the beach all day.
With his clashing teeth and shaggy jaws
Hour upon hour he gnaws
The rumbling, tumbling stones,
And ‘Bones, bones, bones, bones! ‘
The giant sea-dog moans,
Licking his greasy paws.
And when the night wind roars
And the moon rocks in the stormy cloud,
He bounds to his feet and snuffs and sniffs,
Shaking his wet sides over the cliffs,
And howls and hollos long and loud.
But on quiet days in May or June,
When even the grasses on the dune
Play no more their reedy tune,
With his head between his paws
He lies on the sandy shores,
So quiet, so quiet, he scarcely snores.
James Reeves
The Fruit Garden Path
Fuji X100
Landscape photography, Nigel Borrington
The Fruit Garden Path by Amy Lowell
The path runs straight between the flowering rows,
A moonlit path, hemmed in by beds of bloom,
Where phlox and marigolds dispute for room
With tall, red dahlias and the briar rose.
Tis reckless prodigality which throws
Into the night these wafts of rich perfume
Which sweep across the garden like a plume.
Over the trees a single bright star glows.
Dear garden of my childhood, here my years
Have run away like little grains of sand;
The moments of my life, its hopes and fears
Have all found utterance here, where now I stand;
My eyes ache with the weight of unshed tears,
You are my home, do you not understand?
Light Between The Trees
Fujifilm X100
Kilkenny Landscape photography, Nigel Borrington
Title: Light Between The Trees
Author: Henry Van Dyke
Long, long, long the trail
Through the brooding forest-gloom,
Down the shadowy, lonely vale
Into silence, like a room
Where the light of life has fled,
And the jealous curtains close
Round the passionless repose
Of the silent dead.
Plod, plod, plod away,
Step by step in mouldering moss;
Thick branches bar the day
Over languid streams that cross
Softly, slowly, with a sound
Like a smothered weeping,
In their aimless creeping
Through enchanted ground.
“Yield, yield, yield thy quest,”
Whispers through the woodland deep;
“Come to me and be at rest;
I am slumber, I am sleep.”
Then the weary feet would fail,
But the never-daunted will
Urges “Forward, forward still!
Press along the trail!”
Breast, breast, breast the slope
See, the path is growing steep.
Hark! a little song of hope
Where the stream begins to leap.
Though the forest, far and wide,
Still shuts out the bending blue,
We shall finally win through,
Cross the long divide.
On, on, on we tramp!
Will the journey never end?
Over yonder lies the camp;
Welcome waits us there, my friend.
Can we reach it ere the night?
Upward, upward, never fear!
Look, the summit must be near;
See the line of light!
Red, red, red the shine
Of the splendour in the west,
Last Night as I was sleeping
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was life I had
here inside my heart.
Antonio Machado
Working Together
Nikon D90, May 2011
We work together
We work as one
Though there may be times
When we don’t ‘get on’
We may not always
See ‘eye to eye’
And sometimes we feel
Like saying ‘good-bye’
When this happens
We shouldn’t lose heart
For of ‘something greater’
We are all a part
Each one of us
Has a role to play
In making this
A brighter day
Janice Walkden
Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put to sea
But such a tides as moving seems asleep,
Too full of sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home
Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar
Tennyson…
Autonomy
Independent Heart
Soft words you spoken
From the heart that is broken
I know deep inside
You have a level of independence
With a mystery of suspense
You are recovering
Waiting for someone
To catch on to the discovering
Of the real you
With a heart so true
Giving of your best
Expecting nothing less
While hurt is making amends
Leaning on loving friends
Accounted for in time you spend
With words you write
Not giving into a broken hearts flight
Staying strong
Carrying others like me along
by Jodie Moore
Created on: May 22, 2007
The Sea – Louis MacNeice
The Sea
Incorrigible, ruthless,
It rattles the shingly beach of my childhood,
Subtle, the opposite of the earth,
And, unlike earth, capable
Any time at all of proclaiming eternity
Like something or someone to whom
We have to surrender, finding
Through that surrender life.
Louis MacNeice 1907-1963
Nigel Borrington 
And life is like this?
Nikon D7000, 18-200mm vr lens
Nigel Borrington
One morning two years ago I was out walking Molly on the beach at Oysterhaven, county Cork, when I noticed this Woman learning to windsurf, time and time again she went through this cycle – on the board off the board. Up again time and time again. I remember telling myself there you have it, that’s it that’s life, we don’t belong on the board do we. Naturally we belong off the board but its our job to keep getting back on!
So a poem
Getting back up
Life is a bright, long star boulevard,
Where you get good, when you work hard.
But Life is not a fantasy,
or just a love that’s shared between thee’
It’s a battlefield of broken goals,
A purple sky with empty souls.
The city streets with littered trash,
the wild fire left with ash.
Falling, hurting,
crying, blurting,
fearing, slipping,
failing, tripping.
Lies from fakers,
burning heart breakers.
Those knocking you down,
smiling when you frown.
But others tell you keep on going,
you try so hard though your steps are slowing.
You can’t see the future or get a head start,
So getting back up is the hardest part.
I think life is a learning experience, sometimes we fail and sometimes we fall off. I think we will be measured by our ability to both recognise this fact and then to see the process of climbing back on as just part of the fun!
Nigel
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May 2, 2013 | Categories: Comment, Poetry Gallery | Tags: Kilkenny, life, motivation, Nikon D7000, poem, poetry | 12 Comments