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The year collapses. Creatures hoard and hide;
The sun’s thin gruel does not sustain; All Souls
Is chorused with phlegm and colds, and man’s pride
Flickers in guiltiness like dying coals.
Fireworks!
Flare and smoke in the foggy dark,
Crump
of mines and crackers like tearing cloth;A spent hydrangea gapes in the fumes’ murk,
And starved, a fuchsia droops its lifeless mouth.
Windstruck,
the sycamore and pollard lime
Disgorge
their leaves, blood-brown and pumpkin-yellow;Crackling in piles or mulched with the streets’ grime
They smother boots and wheels, sticky as tallow.
Stripped
tree crowns supplicate like sinners’ hands,
Ignored
by the corn-plaster morning moon;Birch catkins like joss stick ash hang in bands:
The fairground starling fizzes its showman’s croon.
Mornings
are bromine-dull. Ablution-steam
From
bathrooms plumes the air; rime like sugarSprinkles the eaves. Post-noon a drowsy gloom
Blanches the clammy light. At dusk a figure
Homes
in a breath-cloud, the frost-melt hardens
And
night, plum-black, annihilates the sky:Rooks before roosting palaver in gardens.
Come dawn and gruff horses loom in the lea,
Herring
gulls vortex onto the river bank –
Where
death pinpoints the straggler with a snapped shank.
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© November 2012