It must be the heat, our imaginations are playing up. These poems were written long ago but it’s now that we see them, notice them, now that people send them in. Angela Topping imagines her perfect refuge, and the illustration is her own painting of a garden which she did while at Lumb Bank. Perhaps it is her ideal garden beside the beach hut.

Sarah Watkinson sent one of the oddest of sonnets, complete with a scientific citation: Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, Clarke H., and Warrant, Eric J. (2012) Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation, Current Biology. You can just imagine the dung beetles creeping out in a hot night after the sun has gone, guided by all those stars.

Then comes the longest poem this week, by LS Bassen. I don’t entirely understand it but wow. Hard to tell whether it’s a story…