Kathy Pimlott

September 2021  

I move into September shell-shocked by a traumatic and sudden family bereavement which changes a great deal. It's too early to say how the grief will manifest. At present I'm living day by day and letting whatever comes unfold. At the private funeral, I stumbled through this poem by Robert Graves:

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

It's the right time of year of course, but there are are cabbage whites everywhere and it is a strange comfort.

​​I'm reading

The North - Together Apart issue - in brief snatches in the night.