Autumn drives her wind-horse to the gates of change.
She heaves fresh faced in shadows of a sheltering wall.
Eager to test the lie, so to speak, she sighs-

'Is it time yet, is it time?'

She observes a world half asleep, half dead.

'O dessicate Summer, O thirsty lady,
you have sapped all strength,
mopped the life-blood, leached all colour,
turned blushing petals to withered cusps,
you have turned this world to crumbling dust.'

Cat-like she steals, then with a gust....leaps!
whipping a dry pool of terrified leaves into a freshening frenzy.

'I'm here!' she cries 'It's my time.
Dance your full-blown pirouette!'

She turns to a world where neglected grapevines droop.
In the garden of ripening fruit, she plucks bruised from new;
mouldering black fruit that hangs in the crooked elbow of a thirsty tree.

Saddened, her tears fall on leaf-dead ground.
Slow tears, tears to tease dormant seeds from cracked hard-packed ground.
But listen to that sound.....
count the minims spilling on the quavering split terrain!

Net the hour, capture the perfume of moist grass where there is yet no greenness,
where the fat toad leans towards a blackening sky.

We are but children journeying from one season to the next

'Are we there yet? Are we nearly there?'

And when the storm comes we will know to light our way
into the garden of ripening fruit.



copyright © Caroline Grace 2011