October
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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.