Poetry and Appleby Scenes 3

Jerrie Banz:
CHASING RAINBOWS

My husband asked me the other day
While I was gazing at the sky
Just what I was looking for
Watching clouds go passing by
I said, " I am chasing rainbows"
But I could not explain
That you cannot know a rainbow
Until you have felt the rain.
Although life has it's ups and downs
I still have the ability to see
The beauty in a fragile flower
The sturdiness in the tree
If you are looking for a special place
A rainbow for the find
The beauty is God's creation
The rainbows in your mind
I will forever search for rainbows
In each new face I see
In every budding flower
And each slender trembling tree
I know somewhere beyond all this
Is a place I can soar and fly
Remember me with happiness
I'm chasing rainbows in the sky.

Have you written a poem about Appleby? We would love to hear from you! If there is a particular poem you would like to see here please let us know!
The photographs accompanying the poems depict various aspects of Appleby
- the village and garden wildlife - and were taken recently.

Disappearing Dialects

HAUVE: An instruction given to a horse to turn left. In different parts of the county the words HEAT, COME HITHER, CUBBEA and MIDDA-WHOY were also used.

Francis Thompson:
TO A SNOWFLAKE

What heart could have thought you?-
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapour?-
‘God was my shaper.
Passing surmissal,
He hammered, He wrought me,
From curled silver vapour,
To lust of His mind:-
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And his graver of frost’.