Gremlin

Oops, I think I just published a blog post with nothing on it. In fact, it's a miracle I'm posting anything at all. The computer has a gremlin.

It's OK. It's not the sort of gremlin that posts rude remarks in somebody else's name, or tries to spend a lot of money. It's just some sort of gremlin that makes the computer slow and sulky, and won't let me into my own blog. I'm only here now because I crept in through a side door that the gremlin didn't know about. Don't tell it, will you? Oh, how I need Captain Lugg to settle it for me.

It may be the same gremlin that made rain come sluicing down yesterday when we were taking Mum and Dad for a trip round Warkworth and Alnmouth. It is quite possibly the gremlin that left a bag of candles just where Tony would trip over it. It also hid most of the poetry books, but I found them.

This was important, because now and again a few of us from the village and round about - maybe seven or eight of us - get together to share lunch and poems. The theme for tomorrow is 'hope'. This is by one of my favourite poets, Kenneth C Steven, a poet from the Western Isles of Scotland. The collection is called IONA, an this is -

LAMB

I found a lamb
Tugged by the guyropes of the wind
Trying so hard to get up.

It was no more than a trembling bundle
A bag of bones and wet wool
A voice made of crying, like a child's.

What a beginning, what a fall,
To be born on the edge of the world
Between the sea and America.

Lamb, out of this island of stone
Yellow is coming, golden promises,
The buttery sunlight of spring.