Dorset writer and poet, Sarah Acton, created Wildwriting! Dorset as part of Activate’s micro commission programme, Creative Communities in Quarantine. Wildwriting! Dorset is in partnership with Stepping into Nature.
The project encouraged members of the public to venture outdoors, explore your garden or sit by a window and take in nature. With the help of Sarah’s Wildwriting! guides many of you took pen to paper to explore topics including weather, seasons, trees and birds.
Here are some of the contributions made by you. Thank you.
Callistemon or Bottlebrush Plant? by Linda Dobbs
Here comes an inquisitive visitor –
parting branches of overblown neighbours,
crushing spent blooms underfoot like a guest
confetti-treading after a wedding –
to check I’m thriving after summer’s heat.
Flower spikes gone; now, parched fruits weigh me down.
Apricot Breeze by Sandra Young
The whisper of a breeze
from southern lands tinged
with scents of apricot
playfully strokes the wings
of the small holly blue.
A tiny speck of sky
dreamt by a butterfly.
The View from Here by Andrew Varndell
I come here for the view,
To stop a while and think of you.
You used to love it here,
It makes me smile to know you’re near.
We used to stop and sit,
To get away, just for a bit.
The sky was always blue,
The feelings deep within me grew.
The voices in my head,
They tell me you’re not really dead.
I don’t care what they say,
Nobody saw us on that day.
Nobody knows the facts,
The razor cuts, the sharpened axe.
No body ever found,
Beneath the stones, safe under ground.
I gently move the stones,
To catch a glimpse of marbled bones.
You used to love it here,
I watch it fall, the single tear.
I come here for the view,
To stand here and watch over you.
The Wind by Della Crean
The wind tells its own tale,
sings its own melody
It can fill a sail,
it can stir up the sea,
It will rattle your windows
and shake your doors,
When the wind blows
across the moors.
It can serve as a warning
to all humankind,
Ot it may be a blessing
the wind, the wind.
The Lavender Bush by Margaret Naine
Here come more honey bees, thirty or more to join the throng already probing every purple spear for the last drop of nectar.
A lone white butterfly hovers hopefully over the buzzing bush then decides to zigzag over to a Purple Verbena.
Seagulls cry intermittently from the roof tops, a pigeon calls
coo cooo cooo roo coo… coo coooo cooo roo coo