Alchemisland

September embers

Remember what

Intemperate Summer’s insufferable temperatures

Lured us forgetting lurid musk, hot breath beading flesh

Such heat seeming endless

Cold scarce remembered

My digits frigid blue, members of some azure Empire

One cannot chase the wind, there is what is

Sky reposed all season in bold lapis dethroned

By bone-coloured greyness, sky pied like one old

Embracing the end of Summer adventures

Graceful, hayful haze and lanky, endless days

Give way to leaf-loud pavements, greenery’s estrangement

A season of changing

Of achings and changelings, breaking of twigs

Shaking chains at whipping wind gripping, growing in insistence

Closer Christmas, crisp winds wisp through heathland

Heaped with hoarfrost, hard shattering underfoot

The bard stubs out his fag underfoot, stands at a hill’s foot

An ancient oak’s fingermad shadows shattering across his crookback pose

Writing a poem to a rose

Where goes Persephone

Arose, so on again.