Robin metaphors and sympathy

Back again. This is the robin which this year has accompanied me while I am digging. If I stop he seems to protest or rather remind me to get on with the job of providing him with worms and bugs.

A the Farmers' Market the stallholder, a former journalist,  who offers hot spiced apple-juice and, in the Autumn chocolate-covered cob nuts (hazel nuts), likes to talk about poetry. He tells me of a poem which was read on BBC Radio 4 about the poet's dialysis . Somebody on the programme complained, he says, that the poem had no metaphors. The subject needed none, the poet said. The procedure itself sufficed as an image and a statement. Poetry with or without metaphors, is rare commodity at farmers markets.

In this icy weather a man  with curly grey hair, standing at the bus stop opposite the station makes me shiver in sympathy. He is in in shorts and his bare legs are stuck into wellington boots.