I wrote a poem about October, featuring hollyhocks, vines and starlings. I'm not sure the last verse isn't rather obscure. It's just that when I was young, starlings were common (I think they're making a comeback in places now), and before I spent a life in science, defining natural kinds in terms of their behaviour and objective characters, birds could mean so many things!

 

October

 

Zounds! The hollyhock’s drunk again,

Sways from a footless fulcrum,

Lurches but cannot fall;

And the grapevine shoots

Thrash sclerotic leaves,

First resentful, then cross,

As they hunt like tethered wasps.

All is awash with wind

As the garden dims

And the year disappears

Into October.

 

Straight down comes the rain, briefly abates,

Swirls, ceases in a net,

Then blows across in pillows

Which burst as they beat up

Some teeming ahead;

A family of fallings

Receives a roof-full of applause.

And the trees are chattering

As the long hours scatter

Into memory

Behind October.

 

Birds fragment in an upward shower;

I thought they were starlings,

But that was long ago,

When the sky opened

Blind and assured.

Now there is only behaviour;

Birds observed, finally set free

Of me and you,

Of everything untrue,

Wonderful;

Free of October.