Months: June

The poems for March, April and May in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March and 20 April.

------------
Summer solstice: for immortal hours the sun
Dazzles tarmac and field, boiling greatly
And large in the sky. Day’s eternity done,
Rises the moon like beaten pewter, stately

And immense. Honeysuckle chivvies the lanes

With scent, strengthened with the tang of the year’s
First cut of silage. Men are urgent – thanes
To daylight’s drug, fixing tools, greasing gears.

The ash has tardily leaved above hawthorn

Sudsily frothing; nettles and grasses
Are purple, stifling the curded viburnum:
Dogs dustily tumble in madcap races.

Each morning the blatant chatter of sparrows

Rouses streets like coins rattled in a bowl;
Goldcrest flash in a larch’s dark narrows;
In brakes a pheasant dodges with his red poll.

From waxy buttercups to black-cupped poppies

All is profusion. The cream-cake roses –
Luscious in odour – shadow gentilities
Of pot plants – marigolds and flat-faced pansies;

The tough cascading foxglove is aloof.

Forgotten, a stream placid over gravel
Turns a waterwheel, dousing each paddle’s growth
Of wet-dark moss. Beneath its muted trundle

The water puzzles as if seeking sense;
The wheel turns without end or consequence.

====================

© June 2013