The party’s over

Hooray! The bright flag bunting now is out,
fluttering festively in a light breeze,
festooning the branches of the trees,
lemon, bronze, beige, hung about
the path that winds through the wood.

Now, though, they’ve become dry brittle pages,
their supports the bars of strong stout cages.
Ageing paperbacks falling apart would
trail across my vision in such a way.

Beneath my feet they crunch and crack,
the golds and scarlets spread across the track
mingling with tan, and dun, and grey.

Soon early winter’s drizzle will send a brook
cascading down the slope, the stones and sludge
a dreary carpet on which to trudge.

The party’s over; autumn’s done, so close the book.

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Equinox

The river’s breath creeps up
and beyond the bedroom window.
We awake to luminous daylight
on the first day of autumn.

But my mind goes back
to a different bedroom,
a different window,
a view blanked out by a white blanket
which, slowly clearing, reveals
our field, the bordering trees,
the sight of more fields
sloping to the south,
to the distant unseen sea
and its deserted beaches.

Unseen too are the late ripening blackberries,
the vixen looping along the hedge,
pausing to listen for a hoped-for prey.
Unseen are the screaming swallows
for they have departed their cowshed beams,
their third brood fed fat by the bounty
hovering above the cut hay meadow.

Here, the mist is thinning
now, drifting from the panes
outside our bedroom’s windows.
The leaves are dropped from the copper beech at the churchyard’s margin,
the dried fruits are falling from the ornamental pear
and we, like butterflies fluttering
a last hurrah in the shed,
lie wriggling, cocooned in our soft sheets
contemplating the future,
the passing of the seasons and the day
when the sun will again stand still.

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Poem written for a creative writing task on ecology

Doggerel days

So autumn comes to southern climes:
bid farewell now to summer,
the best of times. The worst of times?
When fingers get much number.

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Dog days are the really hot days of summer when Sirius the ‘dog star’ briefly appears before the sun dawns in the northern hemisphere. Doggerel days can be at any other time

This piece of doggerel was inspired by a post on the blog Gert Loveday’s Fun with Books.

Autumn

Sunday: church bells peal,
starlings whirring, buzzards squeal,
black glove jackdaws wheel

lost

no leaves left on trees
last season’s clothes lost and, turned
to sludge, washed away

daybreak breakfast

thick mist greets daybreak
slice up the fog, take a bite
autumnal breakfast

fall

tree shivering breeze
leaves cling resolutely but
they will fall, and freeze