A little while ago I put my name down for Stephanie Thorton’s haiku contest, and then happily forgot all about it until some generous comments on an older blog entry alerted me to the fact that it's today and tomorrow allocated to post our haikus! Ooops. And why is it that when you set out to try and deliberately write something for a purpose, your mind turns into a lumpen mass of porridge? Or is that just me? Anywhoo... remembering Stephanie's premise was literature-related, and me being no real writer much less poet, I decided to take as my inspiration and theme a recent experience.

Last week I was moving some boxes of books around in the my attic in an attempt to make space for more. There are three generations of books mingled together up there: my father's, my grandfather's, and mine. Odd that it was always the men of my family that were the readers!

Inevitably, I found myself browsing through some of the books instead of just checking for mouse and damp damage. I rediscovered many old friends up there. Amongst them I found a small yellowing and dog-eared paperback copy of Mary Renault's Last of the Wine. Many of the pages were loose - I hadn't been its first owner (it's actually 6 years older than I am) and its binding had been poor even before I'd finished reading, re-reading and weeping on it. Considering how much that book had meant to me during my 16th year, it's hard to believe I left to moulder in the attic rather than being accorded its rightful place in the bookcase where my best-beloveds live. Cruel, cruel I am.

So, I flicked through it and revisited the self I had been when I'd loved this book almost to the point of its destruction. On page 197, in the last sentence of Chapter 19, the two heroes of the novel finally, and most discretely, consummate their love affair: "I am here." I found that page and the one facing it marked with the faint shadowy outline of several rose petals that had been pressed between them years ago and which now fluttered out like moths. The coarse paper had drained all their colour and left them brittle and transparent, but I knew they had been red, and heavily scented. I had been truly, madly, deeply in love with their giver - for all of one summer. Romantic, no? *grin* The stuff of haiku, maybe?

Clasped in the pages,
faded ghosts of lovers passed
with summer's ending.