Delicious dampness, fresh scented grey,
Washing the stuffy warm weather away
My soul is a sponge, expanding when wet,
And sunshine’s a word I’d rather forget,
I like the newness of autumn (but its only July!)
The soggy clean clouds that fill up the sky
Change is the thing, after two weeks the same,
Filled with humid hot weather –Thank God for rain!
The four corners of the sky
are suffocated with clouds
layered pewter curves
closing in.
Humidity and headaches rise,
mornings welcome freshness
has fled like an illicit lover.
They bend and stoop
In a flurry of action
Grabbing great handfuls of snow
Crushing and moulding
Until a snowball lofts high
Arcing across the winter afternoon
Plopping down on a vivid coat
Chilling an unprotected neck
Cries of laughter and outrage fill the cold air
Autumn leaves colour lawns orange
Litter roads red
The long slide into the cold begins
Advent madness beckons
Like a siren
Calling us onto the rocks
Of family festivities, hidden lonelinesses, retail greed and envy
Soon rooftops will grow neon reindeer
Tinsel will be worn around necks at office parties
All too soon
It will be Christmas
Storm Ophelia (once a category 3 hurricane) has today brought dust from the Azores and from Portugal. In the west of England, people can smell burning too………..rather apocalyptic.
I am scrabbling for a word
To describe the noise of chickens
Scrabbling in the garden
It isn’t rustling
The leaves above are doing that
Rustle is a high pitched word
I need a lower pitich
Mustle, grustle
Tustle is what one hen is doing with a worm
Now there’s a sudden outbreak of snail football
The snail always loses
It’s life
On this sunny late October afternoon
Maybe its scrabbling after all
The storm shouts through tree limbs
Cracks and breaks
Whips branches to frenzied tossing
Blows and whistles
Hammers against windows and doors
Shrieks and groans
Pries open roofs, flings tiles to the sky
Never lessens to a moan
But instead increases its relentless noise
Until, astonishingly, we are forced to cover our ears
In our shelter at the buildings centre
Huddling
A barrage of artillery scatalogically fires
Bangs resound around
Items sharply spatter the window
Cracking and splintering
Words struggle to encompass what we now hear
Howling winds crescendo
Tortured wood explodes into fragments
Breaking glass like sugar
The Nissan hut shudders creaks shifts
Exhales sobs sighs
Would weep we feel as we weep
Fearing the storms ferocity
Staccato thrumming is in fact the rain
Finally gentling
Light begins to filter between thrashing trees
The loud dark recedes
Easing ourselves from our shelter at the huts centre
To the shattered doors
To the belated soggy dawn
To the ruin without
Scrambling through huge debris
Living trees churned to matchsticks
English Oaks cut off at two foot high
By the mighty hand of the storm
Written about my experience during the Great Storm of 1987. Thirty years ago, this storm hit Southern England like a hurricane — felling millions of trees.
Ironically, I was training to be a Weather Forecaster at the time (the storm was not forecast correctly), and I was living through the storm during the night of October 15th in a Nissan Hut at the UK Meteorological Office College.
Cant remember where
Or when.
But in the busy travellings of last week,
alone in a lane of green leaves,
Stood a single tree.
Clad in oranges and crimsons,
lighted with brief yellows.
Spectacular.
These days,
I have just two seasons clothes,
Summer and Winter.
‘Layering’ is supposed to fill the gap
And so, I sit here
Jeans, T-shirt, hoodie,
slightly chilled.
Where once I would have had
an autumn coat
With thin woollen gloves.
Autumn clothes,
Like the tree.
Smoky tendrils reach out to sunlit waters
As Baltic sea mist creeps to Helsinki
Coming to market for Cloud berries perhaps
Ferries leave Market Square and slowly disappear
Once at our island destination
(A cold journey with no sights to see)
The jetty is disembodied
Fragmentary in fog
Walking reveals low rocky terrain
Suddenly a sunlit beach
From where we watch
A second larger island slowly appear
On a journey out of the haze
