Thirty Days

Withdrawing into itself, this long year

reframes its course, stumbles to November silence.

The season of damp socks and clogged gutters.

 

There’s a loosening of grip, every future

tense with the rustle of pavements, their amber drift.

Confess: not one leaf knows where it will fall.

 

Driven by tailwinds of our past, you’ve reached

that place you can let go. A nation at half-mast,

all cable ties and cheapjack manufacture.

 

Let colours fly. Until starlings gather

there are few enough birds to fill the sky. Sodden

after storm, a frayed, bedraggled prospect.

 

x. 2025

WATCH AND WAIT

A kestrel quarters the allotment, sees

where the eye may take him.

I too find my bearings

in a wild silence of flood plain,

beyond the hum of land management.

Only the draught through branches 

for company. Its fitful swell

and waning at the disguised boundary:

always there must be lawns to mow,

concrete to lay, fences to erect

and guard. A possessed realm.

Even on this dreich day, when time goes back,

it should not be so quiet.

We only know what can be heard:

in sodden woods, where few birds call,

the scrunch of acorns trampled

softly underfoot. A rotten world

until the clocks advance once more.

 

 xi. 2023

APRICITY

How does it come to end?

This postcard beauty: snow-clad skeletons

bent under the weight of winter.

A skyline of relentless pine and fir,

with arms bowed down to meet the ground.

The frozen stream encased.

 

Our compacted track runs out,

a last stroke of dried-up pen on blank page.

Beyond where the boot prints fade, one more step

leaves us knee high, struggling

to obtain some purchase. Clumsy,

surrounded by icy stillness.

 

For no birds sing and other creatures hide,

bear their bodies lightly.

Sunshine thaws this day; we listen

to its melting, do not foresee

the griefs not yet begun,

when we no longer hear the frost return.

 

i. 2023