New toadtales: Ancient as the hills

 Ancient as the hills...

Telling Toads, the next poems

Telling Toads continues to hop slowly forwards (this is a Toad project so doesn’t often do “hasty”).

In this the Froglife Year of the Toad, here at Creeping Toad, I am inviting people to add their own creative ideas to a collection of Toad (and frog and tree frog,) stories and poems.  We hope people will share these beyond the blog where they will appear, to read them aloud, to tell the stories, declaim poems by ponds and generally celebrate Toads and their cousins.*

This is now our third set of poems, coming from the Keele Poets at Silverdale in Staffordshire (best link for more information is through Caroline Hawkridge, the group's tutor). If you are part of such a group, take a look at the opening blog (toad-creep over to it here) and challenge yourselves!

The Difference Between Frogs and Toads

by Mary Williams

Frogs are NOW

Toads are then.

Frogs hop, jump, leap,

Toads clamber.

Frogs are edible. Ask the French.

Nobody eats toads.

Frogs can be beautiful, and poisonous.

Toads are just poisonous.

A cat will never catch a toad..

A cat and a frog, on the other hand, have hours of fun together

Frogs exude their offspring in any old ditch and dyke.

Toads are more choosy.

Frogs are common as muck.

Toads are refined.

Frogs are always active; climb trees, swim lakes,

Toads are more stationary. Contemplative, buddha like.

Toads have a secret weapon.

Australians will tell you. Cane toads,

Enemies of the people.

Frogs will only harm you if you use blowdarts.

Frogs make a racket at night, like motorbikes revving up,

Toads are quiet as the grave.

Frogs get thrown on the floor by angry princesses, just for one kiss.

Nothing like that ever happened to a toad.

I rest my case.

Hackney Squatters

by Mary Williams

When rain storms filled the drains

in the Hackney yard of our old house,

two toads appeared, huddled together

on the back-door mat.

I nearly trod on them.

London toads, golden eyed; ancient as the hills,

their mouths turned down in disapproval

at having to be here.

In my head,

I heard one tell the other to budge up.

Were they a pair, male and female?

It seemed impertinant to consider it,

like Queen Victoria’s undergarments.

In such a tiny garden, how had I not seen them?

What were they waiting for?

For the rain to stop, for me to let them in?

Perhaps they were searching for green ponds,

swarms of tasty flies, safe shelter from the rain.

They carried magic on their warty backs

all the way from Kingsland Road to Christendom.

When the rain stopped, they were gone.

Their mystery stayed with me.

Pucker Up

by John Statham

Princess, please be regal! Don’t kiss that frog

when charming, handsome, eager toads like me

have all the females in these fields agog.

Frogs have their place, and don’t the French just know it,

with mint, a hint of nutmeg, tartare sauce,

but snog a frog – yuck! Every time he’ll blow it.

Your Highness, go upmarket, kiss a toad;

forget Grimm’s fairy stories – so last year.

Pucker up to me, true love’s overload.

Kiss my magic warts: frogs are passé, stale.

Whisper to me that you’ll always love me

and we will write a brand new fairy tale.

* but please do not publish them without getting formal permission first!

Photo credits (with many thanks!)

Frog-strip: Maria van Daalen

Toad 1, Toad 2 and Frog: Shaun Walters

Beneath the surface....issues among tadpoles

Beneath the surface

a tadpole's life is not always a happy one....

latest Telling Toads contributions

Life in a toad pond or a frog pool is not always easy. Even getting there after a winter of deep dreams in a cold rocky hollow is fraught with peril (and if you humans would ike to help, look for a local
Toad Crossing team, or check out Froglife’s “Toads  on Roads” page). As tadpoles grow, in a warm wet summer, a pond may be a good place to be but if there is too muhc sun and too little rain and the water begins to go…..Natterjacks in their rainwater hollows on heaths and dunes aim to grow fast and start hopping soon: their water is supply is precarious. Our amphibians don’t have those magnificent African Bullfrogs Dads who guard their squirming tadpole swarms (they have even been known to make lions back off, more, i suspect, from confusion than from fear) and who will dig channels from a drying puddle of ‘poles into the deeper, if more precarious, waters of a bigger pool. Our amphibians have to sit there and sing for the rain....

And all that is a longer introduction to the next two Telling Toads contributions…..its summer, I hope you get a chance to sit around somewhere enjoying the season…why not put pen to paper, pencil to note or finger to keypad and send us your own toady contribution….don’t know where to start? See the suggestions that are coming in on the Whispers pages. To read more of our Telling Toads pieces simply search this blog for Telling Toads!

Toads 
Susannah Violette
All sizes they bloat their night-bodies.
With their bulimic tongues, belch
their language of tadpole begetting,
of water seeking,
of climbing damp belly
to warty back
and thrusting
whilst asking:
Is this our puddle?
Am I home yet?

999 Tadpoles
Rosemary McLeish
I can't tell you how awful it is in this pond.
It's a heaving, seething, struggling, lumpy
milk pudding of a mud-hole.
I am surrounded by brothers. 
All they do all day is push and shove, making
more room for themselves. I sit tight
in my tiny space ignoring their jostling.
I keep myself small.

Somebody prods us with a stick.
Alarm stirs the pool into a whirling chaos of
brothers fighting to get out.
A lot of casualties.
At least the gruel thins.

Some of the brothers are growing legs.
They're eating the little ones.
But there still isn't room enough and now
they can kick, not just squirm.
They leave me alone, I don't know why,
so I can swim around a little, stretch.
Some great bird swoops down every day,
scoops up a beakful of us -
you can see them kicking as he glugs them down his throat.
He never comes near me.

Now we're all getting bigger, some are taking off,
jumping out of the pond, disappearing into the long grass.
The water in the pond is clearing,
brightening.
I can tell apart the ones with boring brown blotches now,
some long and thin,
some chubby, some tough and mean,
some cheery and silly.
Still fighting from time to time.
Some days I think it must be the weather.

I begged them to stop but they cold-shouldered me,
preferring fights to rational discourse.
I asked why they didn't like me,
but they looked at me as if I'd crawled out from under a stone.
Once in a while they suspend hostilities, all join
together to raise their voices in harmony to greet the dawn.
It gets on my nerves.
I tried to join them but they don't want to hear
my rusty burping voice, say I can't sing their tune.

They've all gone now. Left me behind.
I've got the whole pond to myself..
Nobody croaking, nobody quarrelling.
I can swim from one end to the other
and across from side to side.

At first it was just what I'd wanted.
The space to breathe,
so still and quiet I could think my own thoughts.
As much food as I could eat.
But gradually I began to miss them.
All that pushing and shoving, something happening
all the time.
Now it's just me and the pond and the weather,
it gets very boring. I'm lonely.
Wonder why they all left, why nobody ate me.
Wonder what's the matter with me.

The duckweed has been cleared,
so when the sun came out I saw myself reflected,
long and deep in the still water.
I looked over my shoulder,
nobody there but me.
No wonder they left me alone.
What a freak!
Yellow speckles, exopthalmic eyes, warty chin.
I should find a large broad leaf
to squat under.

I'm a toad, not a frog! 
But those are diamonds in my eyes.

Originally published in Artesian magazine in 2002, reprinted with poet’s permission

the perils of the deep

Thank you to today's poets, Susannah and Rosie and to Shaun Waters for the rising newt

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

Creeping back: Telling Toads revived

Telling Toads

Celebrate the wonder of amphibians and reptiles 

with a story, a poem or a personal anecdote

Scrawny

Legs on a lump

Of knobbled mud, turning slow,

Blinking golden eyes, gulps a fly,

And stops.

Have you a tale you could tell? A poem that could hop its way onto these pages? A new story that should be spoken? This is an invitation to celebrate the amphibians of the world, from the Frog in your pond to the Toad who creeps through the woodland, from the sheer excitement of a wriggle of tadpoles to the glory of a toad’s golden eyes. Join me for a celebration of amphibians through words.

Amphibians are in danger. Of all the vertebrate groups, amphibians seem to be in the most perilous of situations as populations across the world dwindle before pollution and habitat loss and the ravages of infections they have no defence against. Froglife is a UK based charity that sets out to promote amphibian conservation through active habitat management and wider education. While, Froglife is UK-based, the issues facing amphibians are global and I hope that by sharing our stories and poems we might add a little more momentum to a wider awareness of the wonders of the amphibian worlds.

I am not going to go into the conservation issues here. The Froglife website is a good starting point for UK folks and I am sure you can find local sites in other countries. Here, I would like to invite and challenge my friends in the storytelling, natural history writing and poetry worlds – and just about anyone who feels inspired - to drop their words into this Toad-pool. There are no prizes, probably no money, but I invite us all just to share our creativity because it is a good thing to do. Not because it is weak or feeble or over-privileged but because sharing rewards by its own action and if telling someone else’s story, reciting someone else’s poem can help excite a listener to look a little more closely at the frogs in the field, then we’ll be doing a good job.

I started the Telling Toads project a couple of years ago but then it settled into hibernation. With a hop and a shake and an optmistic croak, as the froglets gear up and toadlets get ready to venture bravely out onto grass (please don't cut your lawn when you see them migrating!), Telling Toads is getting going again....

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for poems or short stories about frog and toads. These might be personal anecdotes, reports of your own adventures, retelling of ancient myths, or pieces catching what you find is the essence of toad-life. We don’t want scientific papers – but the personal experience of that study might give us rich words to share

No. of words: to keep this under some sort of control: maximum number of words is 500

something a little more exotic might inspire....

Other practical stuff

Nature of work: if your work is racist, sexist, or discriminates on the grounds of species, religion or gender identity, or comes across as simply offensive, we will reject it

The work must be your own original work: if it has been published before, at this stage that is OK as long as we have your permission to put it on a blog. If we build to publication we’ll need to revisit this. We will, meanwhile acknowledge the original publication if you include the details! In submitting your work, you accept that it might be published online and that this is acceptable to you. If the possibility of publication with remuneration develops, we will come back to you

Editorial control: I am the editor of the Toadwords collection and while I will refer to other writers for opinions, I will hold editorial control

Submissions language: English please! Unless there is someone out there who might want to run a parallel Spanish or other language version

your work will be given serious consideration....

What will happen

1. First responses:  initially, we’ll see what sort of response we get. First submissions will be published on this Creeping Toad blog. If submissions build up in numbers, we’ll set up a separate Toadwords blog or website.

2.  Growing numbers: If numbers and quality of work merits it, we’ll look at producing an online resource for people to tap into. Perhaps as a downloadable pdf. If there would be charge for this, we will contact authors about royalties and permissions

3. As work comes in, selected pieces may also appear on the Froglife website and might feature in issues of the newsletter Natterchat

Submissions

As word or plain-text attachments please to:

toadwords@btinternet.com

 

Froglife: and just so no-one can say they don’t know, yes I am not at all impartial. I like Froglife. I am one of their Trustees and I have no qualms at all about saying that I think they/we are an excellent organisation. And, yes, i do know that other amphibian and reptile centred organsiations are available!

Newts, salamanders and caecilians: and no, we’re not ignoring the rest of the amphibian order,  all the amphibs are welcome…and reptiles are invited to the word-party too!

adventurous toad

You might like to take a look at a review of a lovely Frog book: "In Search of Lost Frogs"

Picture credits: from the top:

Toad: myself

Rushes: V Walker

Goldsitch Moss: myself

Dart Frog: Martin Paul

Majestic Toad: Kenny Taylor

Adventurous toadlet: Ian MacLellan

with many thanks!

A dark necklace

A dark necklace…

Telling Toads, 2:

poems and stories for the Year of the Toad

The poems are still slipping in. Slowly, carefully, toad-hopping rather than frog-leaping, possibly even salamander-crawling, but I am hoping to share a new set of words every month and here are the offerings from July

A Haiku special is brewing and a set of photos to give you something to think about is coming in the next few days

I put out a request on facebook for some extra photos to accompany poems and stories and am now wading through an amphibian tidal wave of images. It does, however, give me some rich images to choose from…

If you'd like to find out more about this project, visit the blog post here: Telling Toads

Thanks you, Jane Millum

1. Friend Frog

Tessa Strickland

Friend Frog, your eyes are water jewels.

   Looking at you, I see orbs

of liquid mineral looking back.

You are as inscrutable as a Buddha,

    and I wonder, what is it that you see

gazing out of your frog world

at this bulky, shadowed being-thing

    which has arms and legs, like you,

a heart, like you, but a breathing  apparatus

that can no longer live amphibiously,

    a body that can no longer leap

between river and hill.

Friend Frog, you who can

    hear the earth talk, who can sense

the shifting tremors of the underworld

with your small, exquisite body,

    you who can see and hear and interpret

the elements in ways that are lost to me,

Forgive me, Friend Frog,

   for the way I trample through your domain

in heavy boots.

one of Rob's Axolotls

2. Axolotl

Rob Bounds

In the 1980’s I had one of these amphibians – one of a number of waifs and strays pets adopted alongside gerbils, hamsters and an ill-tempered rabbit.  Said creature came into my possession after its previous owner thought it would make an interesting additional to his fish tank, resulting in his aquarium ending up goldfishless!

30 or so years later I now have another one of these fascinating “walking fish” – alongside a collection of other waif and stray pets…..

When people see this Mexican marvel they frequently say….

“What is that…?”

Some say he’s ugly, some say he is cute.

With his feathery gills he looks like a newt.

He’s not a frog and he’s not a toad,

you won’t see him in a pond or crossing the road.

He’s incredibly rare and can’t be found in the wild.

He never grows up – he’s a perpetual child.

He’s the Water Dog god the Aztecs called Xolotl

Meet my amphibian friend the Axolotl.

3. Haikode to the beginnings of Toad

By WeeVee left as a comment on an earlier post

Elegant toadspawn
Festooned from weed like bunting
Aristocrat toads

Frogs lay globulous
Blobs discombobulous
Toads think 'how common'

3 Pond thoughts

Gordon MacLellan

Some experiments here with a  fib poem (follows a Fibonacci sequence in its lines) and two cinquains (a set sequence of syllables). I then got caught in a personal discussion about whether "wriggling" is two syllables or three

1.

One

Cell

Divides

And again,

And tadpoles squirming

Into a wriggling explosion

Fill a pond with life and hope and dreams of transformation.

2.

Toadspawn,

A string of pearls,

Dark necklace for green weeds,

A gift of wriggling cheerfulness,

With hops.

3.

Scrawny

Legs on a lump

Of knobbled mud, turning slow,

Blinking golden eyes, gulps a fly,

And stops.

With many thanks to our poets and photographers

What's going on? background to this project: Telling Toads 

First poems and pictures are publsihed here:  The First Elegant Hops

Frogs rock in purple socks

A summer for frogs

A new Telling Toads poem

or maybe a song....

How has you summer gone? For our amphibian friends it has been a season of mixed fortunes with an early spring and sudden stretches of almost to hot days. We are still waiting for this summer’s numbers but you might like to know that last year, Froglife’s bold Toads on Roads patrols, helped 98,483 toads at 165 different crossing points.

Find out more by following the link. Be inspired! Be a toad-hero!

Or become a frog-friend. You might dig a pond. You might enocureage a bit of long grass, a pile of old wood, a cheerfully dmap corner ina garden or park. Or you might try following the following advice

The Frog Rap!

Have you sat in the shade?

In the leafy glade

Beside the pool

Where it’s nice and cool

And the frog rocks

In his purple socks

On his lily pad stage

Have you sat in the shade?       

                         

Cos I have!

I’ve sat in the shade

In a leafy glade

Beside the pool

Where it’s nice and cool

And I’ve rocked

With the frog

In his purple socks

But I wore yellow!

Jan Hedger

Thanks to Jan for this contribution to our Telling Toads collection and to Marilyn Dougan for the image. The Frog Rap really needs to be spoken out loud, so why not alarm the people next to you by cheerfully reciting this lovely little poem. I feel there should be a dance that goes with it..... Telling Toads sets out 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

Photos: c/o G MacLellan

 Watch out for the week at the start of October 

when Creeping Toad takes over the Froglife Twitter Feed for a week

Telling Toads: looking for stories

Telling Toads

Celebrate the wonder of Toads with a story, 

a poem or a personal anecdote

sing a song of Toadiness! *

Have you a tale you could tell? A poem that could hop its way onto these pages? A new story that should be spoken? This is an invitation to celebrate the amphibians of the world, from the Frog in your pond to the Toad who creeps through the woodland, from the sheer excitement of a wriggle of tadpoles to the glory of a toad’s golden eyes. Join me for a celebration of Toads through words.

In this, the Froglife Year of the Toad, here at Creeping Toad, I am inviting people to add their own creative ideas to a collection of Toad (and frog and tree frog,) stories and poems.  Initially, we will aim to encourage people to share these beyond the blog where they will appear, to read them aloud, to tell stories, declaim poems by ponds and generally celebrate Toads and their cousins.

Amphibians are in danger. Of all the vertebrate groups, amphibians seem to be in the most perilous of situations as populations across the world dwindle before pollution and habitat loss and the ravages of infections they have no defence against. Froglife is a UK based charity that sets out to promote amphibian conservation through active habitat management and wider education. While, Froglife is UK-based, the issues facing amphibians are global and I hope that by sharing our stories and poems we might add a little more momentum to a wider awareness of the wonders of the amphibian worlds. The decision to launch a Year of the Toad campaign grew out of the research presented in a Froglife paper: http://www.froglife.org/2016/10/06/goodbye-mr-toad/ while the wonderful (and not always sad) book In Search of Lost Frogs by Robin Moore is a great way of connecting to the issues confronting individual species across the Earth. Robin’s book is reviewed on this blog, here

this tiny person is a Leptopelis from Malawi - from a very old slide!

I am not going to go into the conservation issues here. The Froglife website is a good starting point for UK folks and I am sure you can find local sites in other countries. Here, I would like to invite and challenge my friends in the storytelling, natural history writing and poetry worlds – and just about anyone who feels inspired - to drop their words into this Toad-pool. There are no prizes, probably no money, but I invite us all just to share our creativity because it is a good thing to do. Not because it is weak or feeble or over-privileged but because sharing rewards by its own action and if telling someone else’s story, reciting someone else’s poem can help excite a listener to look a little more closely at the frogs in the field, then we’ll be doing a good job.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for poems or short stories about frog and toads. These might be personal anecdotes, reports of your own adventures, retelling of ancient myths, or pieces catching what you find is the essence of toad-life. We don’t want scientific papers – but the personal experience of that study might give us rich words to share

No of words: to keep this under some sort of control: maximum number of words is 500

Other practical stuff

Nature of work: if your work is racist, sexist, or discriminates on the grounds of species, religion or gender identity, or comes across as simply offensive, we will reject it

The work must be your own original work: if it has been published before, at this stage that is OK as long as we have your permission to put it on a blog. If we build to publication we’ll need to revisit this. We will, meanwhile acknowledge the original publication if you include the details! In submitting your work, you accept that it might be published online and that this is acceptable to you. If the possibility of publication with remuneration develops, we will come back to you

Editorial control: I am the editor of the Toadwords collection and while I will refer to other writers for opinions, I will hold editorial control

Submissions language: English please! Unless there is someone out there who might want to run a parallel Spanish or other language version

What will happen

1. First responses:  initally, we’ll see what sort of response we get. First submissions will be published on my Creeping Toad blog. If submissions build up in numbers, we’ll set up a separate Toadwords blog or website. LINK TO TOADBLOG

2.  Growing numbers: If numbers and quality of work merits it, we’ll look at producing an online resource for people to tap into. Perhaps as a downloadable pdf. If there would be charge for this, we will contact authors about royalties and permissions

3. As work comes in, selected pieces will also appear on the Froglife website and might feature in issues of the newsletter Natterchat

Submissions

As word or plain-text attachments please to:

toadwords@btinternet.com

Froglife: and just so no-one can say they don’t know, yes I am not at all impartial. I like Froglife. I am one of their Trustee’s and think the whole Year of the Toad initiative is a good one for rattling a few cages (or splashing in a few ponds) and I have no qualms at all about saying that I think they/we are an excellent organisation

Newts, salamanders and caecilians: and no, we’re not ignoring the rest of the amphibian order, but as The Year of the Toad concentrates on Toads, this project has a tail-less emphasis. If you are inspired by salamanders, motivated by newts or just excessively excited by the caecilian muse, send it in!

* Pictures: all these pictures are by myself apart from * by Kenny Taylor