Friday 16 October 2015

Dawn Fox

In the second stanza "the docks" are weeds not places where one unloads ships.

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(5.00 am, 20 August 2013)

   Woken in pre-dawn gloom
   When gut uncertainties
   Harry the dusk-dark room,  
   A fox shrieked like disease;
My dulled bones stirred and shrank awry
From that cold anthem of a cry.  

   Though August heats were over
   This was my year’s first fox;
   Why had it broken cover
   Screaming beside the docks?   
Joy it had slaughtered for its fill
Or anger it had missed a kill?

   Worse, was its scream a warning –
   That stink and yellow jaw! –
   Fraught in the silent morning
   As the squealing of a door?
Was it for the past a reckoning,
And to some beyond a beckoning?    

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© August 2013

 


Friday 9 October 2015

Months: Lyrics: October

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August and September in this series were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August and 11 September 2015.
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A lime leaf, wind-whipped from its tree,
Switchbacked in air and plucked my wrist,
Its broad-faced green had blanched like cloth  
And rust had made its edges twist;
   Sick, with no remedy, 
   It fell like a struck moth. 

October’s like the grey-backed sea,
Brutal and languid under mist, 
Extracting life from summer’s growth
And crushing it as winter’s grist:
   That lime leaf guilelessly 
   Has blundered into truth.  
 
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© October 2014