NOVEMBERThe grass lies easy on the hillsides, spreading
Over swells and hollows like a length of emerald satin.
Trees cluster in folds of the landscape
Like gossiping guests at a cocktail party.
Dark hedges throw casual arms around hillsides,
Lift up a bracken-topped mound candled
With infant holly and be-witched birch.
Hawthorn berries sodden with rain are
Marooned in their cradle of twigs.
A huddle of blackthorn stretches a winter filigree
Against a pigeon-grey sky. Lane-side hedges
Sport a tawny crew-cut for winter.
Beneath the old oak's convoluted branches,
Clad in their velvet jackets of green,
Ribbons of water serpentine downhill,
Cascade off banks, chase sodden leaves into ditches,
As the gale bowls more, like wet confetti,
Down the lane. A caul of rain drifts up the valley,
Like a lace curtain at a cottage window.
Only the sulphur-yellow of the larches
Brighten in our headlights.
J.C. 2009
© J.C. If you wish to use this poem or any of my blog postings or photographs, please ask first.
That's wonderful, Jennie, I didn't realise at first that it's one of yours. Most excellent :)
ReplyDeleteYou have a real gift for imagery BB. This is very good. I love the "caul of rain" and the "pigeon-grey sky".
ReplyDeleteWhat tellling images you have created of a sodden day! I can "see" the hedgerows "huddled" under a lowering sky, the wet leaves "bowled" along in an undfriendly rush of errant water. Your words create for me a vivid picture of a place I have never been, but as good writing should, they remind me of landscapes I have experienced and the sharp odor of wet oak leaves, the damp fingers of mist, all the aspects of a wet, blowy November day are relived in a rush of memory.
ReplyDeleteThank you all. I have decided, in an Edward Thomas moment!, that perhaps my little word pictures are better suited to blank verse. These were just impressions scribbled down as we drove back from Talley yesterday. Glad you like them.
ReplyDeleteI'm back here to reread your November ode--I really like it--The shapes, colors, scents of the day all sharpen in my mind with a second and third reading.
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