Saturday, 27 September 2014

Months: October

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August and September in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July and 29 August.

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The spiked limes of chestnut plummet and burst,
Gaping like fledglings’ mouths, disgorging nuts
Glossy as foals. The sunspot dahlia, cursed
By rust, sags, and the mauve aster abuts

The ground. Apples, pears, blush ripe and are gathered;
Plums are downy like cheeks, though whitepox mould              
Rots the fallen. Leafage, jaundiced and weathered
Like skin, dangles dolefully, rueing the cold.

Night darkness deepens and sunrise is damp;
Mist like a low tide sluices the coppice.
Birds are silent; and, bodies in a hump,
Folk rush to work, their faces like pumice.

The angry wasp dies. Unmindful, the sheep
In the fields await slaughter. Autumn’s effacement
Looms, and like children feverish in sleep
Folk fidget, resisting the abatement

Of blood and flesh. Post-equinox, the rains
At last begin – a drenching, drumming fall
From cloud like a taut sheet, engulfing drains,
Stained with the city’s lights like yellow gall.

A gale follows. Mountainous gun-metal cloud
Invests the horizon. Battle-primed wind
Assaults the sopping ash trees, barrels loud
In subways. Later, the assault declined,

Sunlight cracks the siege towers’ plinths and domes,
Searing them gold and white with lacquers, chromes.

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© October 2012