Thriving on cold air,
icicles defy hot sun
(from a safe distance).
Cattle breed with swine,
just in someone’s playful mind.
Belted Galloway pigs!
Nature~ Pic and a Word Challenge #390
The farm near my house does raise Belted Galloway cattle; it does not raise any pigs. My guess is that someone wanted to decorate the farm’s entrance with an outdoor sculpture of a Belted Galloway cow, then found one of a Hampshire pig at a flea market or garage sale. Close enough: black-white-black (but with white forelegs). BTW, I found an image of a pig with black-white-black arranged just as on the cattle. Nature can sometimes be playful, too.
“I must grow.”
“I can’t move. Sorry.”
“No problem.”
Kneeling on one knee to capture the image for §1 was no problem for me, but my old legs stiffened in the time it took to get a few photos of the tree’s workaround for the stone. To get up again, I depended on my own workaround.
After a few scares with stiffness from kneeling and balance on slopes earlier this year, I had bought a monopod and then replaced the monopod’s wrist lanyard with a clip that was intended for attaching a key ring to a belt loop.
Having taken the monopod on the walk leading to §1, I extended two of its four sections and used it to get up w/o drama. When collapsed and clipped to a belt loop, the monopod leaves my hands free for wiping sweat or taking photos. Like a good assistant, it’s there when I need it and unobtrusive when I don’t. Remembering to take it when I go for a walk is the hard part.
Stone ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #387
Nesting kestrel turns
to see whose approach it hears.
Medusa quits birding.
Long after making a small cairn from these three stones, I noticed a slight resemblance to a nesting kestrel. Long after that, I recalled the old myth about what happened to people who looked at Medusa’s face. Kudos to Medusa for seeing the effect of her hobby and changing course. She switched to making stoneware pottery.
Red, yellow, and green
did not tell the whole story.
Now, five years later …
Early morning light
sets a gecko aglow, but
it’s not a gecko.
My haiga in response to
Early ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #357
harks back to a painting by René Magritte that is a fun way to make a point in epistemology.
“Bracts” say botanists.
“Those red things are not petals.”
I just call them leaves.
Her crayon goes from Sun to Earth,
thru a window and some glassware,
and then a little farther still.
She scribbles nonsense on a wall.
Yes, using the category [ekphrastic poetry] would be more accurate than using the category [haiga]. The word [ekphrastic] is way too dysphonious for describing any kind of poetry I might like, so I pretend that the poem is a haiku. Close enough?
Ah, such a cheery yellow graces the month of September. Alas, ragweed flowers out of sight at the same time, giving goldenrod a bad rep among some people with hay fever. While ragweed sheds pollen to the whims of the wind, goldenrod holds pollen that will be picked up and transported by insect pollinators. You’re not likely to inhale any goldenrod pollen unless a bee crawls up your nose.
Like many juvenile birds, this male cardinal sat still and looked befuddled, then changed position a little, and then sat still and looked befuddled. With his face centered in the focus frame and a moderately fast shutter speed, he should have been in focus. My camera’s autofocus probably got distracted by the twigs all around him. While my camera has good manual overrides for most of its automatic choices, its manual focusing is a lame joke. So I made lemonade from lemons with the final line of my haiku.
Stoneware bowl
imagines being …
balsa bird.
Mellow Curmudgeon 