past watchful Toads

Watching Toads

a new Telling Toads piece

There have been lots of poetry posts recently...and here is another. This piece by Cherry Doyle is part of the Telling Toads* project and that is as much as I need to say, i think!

Toads

Cherry Doyle

‘Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

Invaded the flax-dam'

Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist

The pond was my flax-dam; black hole into

the centre of the earth, in sticky shade

of conifer and stone, it sucked the light

straight from the leaves. And lurching from the soup

of night and algae, clods of earth upon

itself, with eyes as still as long-dropped beads -

the toads, fat sentinels of rock and pot.

A stoic throb of sides preceded feasts

on garden slimers. Silent plots were formed,

like patient Venus creeping through the dusk

their moon-curved shapes somehow familiar.

And morning, strung along the half-chewed leaves,

cascaded trails of silver carnage, long-

forgotten when the sparkling lace remained.

That summer drifted through the apple trees,

and lingered on the jagged edges of

the greenhouse, lit a treasure map across

the lawn, to crawlers making their escape

from every lifted pot and shifted leaf;

an emerald, a clutch of golden coins,

a secret hoard of gently muddied sun.

*Telling Toads is back to gather new poems and stories celebrating amphibians and reptilesWhy not have a look at the notes about what we are looking for and unleash your inner frogliness across a page or screen…..find out more, here

Photo credits:

Pool and tucked away toad: c/o G MacLellan

Toad's eye: detail from a picture by Kenny Taylor