November Dream
There’s a trailer running through my head
A spooling flicker of bucolic hues
With washed out colours – indistinct,
A ghost of summer draining away -
Soon they might have never been.
Then we’re panning across the hills,
Laid down in ancient cretaceous past,
In a hump and heave of old sea beds,
Smoothed by our forest felling days,
The carve of ice and headward erosion.
Now waterless in the valley floor
With hill top panoramas flashing by
And slowly spinning from green to brown
From deciduous copses dropping their leaves
In a distant haze of smoke and fires
Filling and swirling through a boundary hedge.
The scene changes as winter calls
To standing Oaks under blue white clouds
And drovers tracks with standing limes.
You can almost taste the chilly woods
Edged by fields of broken chocolate brown
All with their coat of early evening frost
And Robins distant brittle song.
Once again its morning tide
With ragged skeins of cold grey mist
Dawdling like unwanted funeral guests,
Down old damp lanes and fallow fields
With leaves piled up in cinnamon coloured drifts.
My head now spinning with wind and ice
Then cut to skittering yellow and cinnamon
Motes in my minds eye , resolving to patches -
Fading colours on rolling fitful breeze,
Then straying blindly through a small wood
Mostly silent but for muffled Pheasant croak
Now reds and browns of carpet leaves
Hushed and wet upon the ground
Heavy fog envelops the trees
With pattering of tear drops like rain to come
