Friday 20 June 2014

Months: July

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

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The month of window boxes: horned nasturtiums,
Petunias and breaking-wave lobelia
Sparkle: the dark-leaved tart geraniums
Are cautious but the party-plate regalia

Of passion flowers trumps all. With a glutton’s smile
Blowsy St John’s Wort bubbles like custard.    
In town’s-edge roughlands children with low guile
Behead dandelions and storm the clustered

Ice cream flutes of bindweed. Ignored, the breeze
Scuffles the rank bushes like gushing water.
Grasshoppers, dauntless among vetch and furze,
Grind their tissue-and-comb call for a partner.

Beyond are the woods. Tall spruce and dense beech
Flash fresh growth. Beneath their shade-cool awning
Wood wasps dart and sing in the sun’s hot shaft,
Moths start from the path dust and grubs hang, dancing

On threads. Hidden, a train soughs through a culvert.
Such musky disarray! Boles, lichened boughs,
Hang, lean, lie, trellised by ivy, inert
To the gross-feeding fungus. Spider and louse

Forage under dust-heavy ferns; the brown
Dunnock, pattering, will devour them. High
On a birch’s flaky trunk a flame-crown
Woodpecker scatters bark, laughing mournfully:

Summer’s workshop of instinct and sensation
Echoes with breeding, killing and mutation.

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© July 2013