Having a small notebook improves your eyesight.  True!  When you force yourself to write something, anything - then you look around with greater attention.  Or, at least I like to think so.  Whenever you write (or at least, whenever I write) there is a nagging devil's advocate voice asking if anything of what you are writing is worthwhile.

     It is an odd thing, I do admit that.  I sit, each day after my obligatory cup of tea and write something in my little (yellow at the moment) notebook.  No one else is doing this, only me.  It does make me think!

     When I was in Cardiff ,a friend asked if all my poetry writing was "just self-indulgence" - I replied (almost) instantly that it was something that I needed to do.  Which, now I think of it, is not really a refutation of the criticism implied in his words.

     Probably the self-questioning about my writing will continue as long as I write, and will probably be a chunk of the subject matter as well.

     There is an element of irony in the title, because, after all, I am doing nothing more than moving a pen around a page and looking at my surroundings with the arrogance of someone who samples what he sees and uses it for what he hopes is a piece of writing which has an element of the "observational acuity" mentioned in the poem!  Well, you judge!

Action

Summer struggles to emerge

from hazy skies, and tries to

counter cooling drafts; it’s

almost there, but sitting ‘out’

is still a gesture rather than delight.

I’m the only one in shorts.

And sitting by myself.

Am I involved?

The curl of other people’s smoke

pricks through my space.  The kids

run-stitch the patchwork tables

into tapestry.  A single voice strand

wraps with other talk:

the hubbub weft that threads the

warp lines of the soft-crunched, stony earth

beneath the rolling needle-drag of metal boule.

And is all this the

observational acuity

I like to think,

or just an action for my pen

to hide a truth?

I am still working on the poems that will make up the sequence called, The Visit, which I hope to publish as a chapbook.  At least the cover is done, now all I have to do is write the introduction!  Work progresses!