A wake up call. Kathleen Jamie is a morning person but the poet often berates herself for not getting up at dawn, “especially in May when the world is at its most glorious”.

How many May dawns

have I slept right through, the trees courageous with blossom?

Let me number them . . .

She might forgive herself an occasional lie in during this cold, uncertain spring. The first days of May have not dawned gloriously. In early morning chill, rain batters the ground and I’m afraid today I turn over and go back to sleep while a blackbird chides sweetly from a cherry tree outside the window.

I’m not a morning person but Kathleen Jamie’s poem Blossom stirs something nagging and tugging inside. Ageing brings its own wake up call. Each new spring seems to come round quicker than the last. How can it be May already?

Blossom is one of the poems included in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems 2015 and the poet/editor Ken MacLeod adds his own comment:

The implied life cycle, blossom to fruit to seed, is a wake-up call. This sharp reminder of fleeting  time is itself timeless, like some lost page of Lao-Tse or Marcus Aurelius. I want to remember it like a motto, burned in the mind like pokerwork!

Acknowledging her own transience, Jamie decided to write a poem a week in 2014. She wrote Blossom in mid-May, the week of her birthday.

Seize the day – no longer May Day,  but there’s a forgiving timelessness in poetry and it’s not too late to listen and enjoy the poem read by the poet herself.  Important as Thursday’s Scottish Elections undoubtedly are, it’s also a welcome reminder that there is more to life well lived than politics.