November Poetry

 

In the park, the leaves of another year have turned

to rust, fallen, rotted and been cleared.

The flower bed at the centre of the lawn is bare,

as is the children’s playground; the coffee-room

is boarded up and a film of water has darkened the colour

of everything: tree trunks, foot-paths, benches.

November’s beauty is not great splashes of primary colour

nor nature’s pretty embellishments, but the textures

that lie beneath them, even the lowered sun throwing

shadows from the unevenness of the ground.

My mind too is shaded by November.

Less distracted by obvious beauties, I search with narrower eye

among the austere denuded trees for patterns

of growth along their barks, of bud-beading,

of the varying strategies in the splay of limbs to capture sunlight.

I have a more artful eye, that bends more quickly to deeper thoughts,

turning sod and light inwards; 

I rework the detritus of the passing year, 

work those textures into words.