July brought a heavy, hot summer night
The roses were fading, the moon was bright
Under its light on silent paws
A ***** looked about and paused
Then turned and slipped back through the yarrow
And the night was all hot and fevered and shadowed
The sycamores sighed and shivered their leaves
Their whispers sang in the summer night's breeze
The fruit trees burgeoned, apples and pears
A bat wove infinity signs in the air
I wasn't dreaming or even asleep
When a cold hand touched me through the sheet
He paused when he realised I was aware
I could feel him watching with intense stare
He talked to me by the glow of the moon
And I left my body there in the room
He took me up and we flew away -
We travelled until the break of day
The moonlight was white and the lawns were dappled
I refuse to say where we went or what happened
Beneath the tracery of the clouds
Amid the calls of long-eared owls
We flew over fields and rivers and hedgerows
As mist rolled down the distant meadows
Jupiter sparkled and close in the sky
Mars and Aldebaran twinkled red eyes
The light was fast growing
The thistle down blowing
His words were full of
Wisdom and knowing
By the time the sky melted its turquoise to blue
I still wasn't certain of who'd summoned who
With words in Latin he gave a soft chortle
And like a shadow slipped back through a portal
He didn't threaten or hurt or hound me
And at least he put me back where he found me.

Good Friday came around
Unlucky in the past:
A dead dog, a missing cat,
Now this year I hear you've passed.
First time I saw you, I cried
We did not speak
The sundogs were burning the
Early autumn sky
And there was no earthly need -
All the dark days of decades past
It was all said back then,
All learned by rote
You wrote in my soul
Pulled me through darkness
I conjured an image,
You played the right notes.

Man in black, black fedora
Researcher and cave explorer
Fact, fiction, myth or real
****** into a darker sphere
Consumed by legends, tombs and runes
To caverns low and castles high
Then snowy mountainside to die
I heard the certificate could have been forged
As though mission had failed and you were no more
I heard a rumour no body was found
Or it wasn't you on that wintry ground
I heard you were seen after the war -
You turned and looked when your name was called
And if you did lie down in the snow
What knowledge and secrets did you hold?
Is your spirit a-quest with wandering?
Are you still out there, searching for something?

First Sunday in Advent brought
Dusting of snow
Brief glimpse of sunlight, pallid and low
Last blooms of autumn were finally lost
In the wisps of the mist and the
Harsh bite of frost
Male blackbird called softly on shed top
Dark silhouette against gloomy sky
Had already tonsured the fruit from the bushes
His mate jumped and fluttered for that left on the sides
Hard ground criss-crossed by bird tracks and cat prints
Silence cracked by flat echo of crows
Honeysuckle berries, black as mouse eyes
Grimly stared at the white world below.

Late July sunlight filters
To nest, lights up the lichens
Your tiny world will soon expand
Beyond your dreams
Twiggy horizon a-dance with oak leaves
Will become first perch then portal
To a vast beyond
A plain of patchwork
Gridded with dark hedgerows
World of barns, stables, cart wheels in clarts
Meadows, ditches, many more trees
Than the one cradling home
Down is flying like thistle seed
Wings are stretching, feathers pristine
Maybe tomorrow will be the day
The late July winds lift you away.

Strange silence settles
Sun almost hidden behind
Blue grey cloud
Wood pigeons that clattered and
Called are poised and mute for
The turning, the shortness of night.
Duskside, rose petals fall,
Confetti of summer
Pinning their place on
The wheel of the year
And the air is thick as thunder
While darkness falls, blanket of cloud
Mantles the sun and
Tucks it under.

Came cold that night.  ***** was
trotting, tail upright like a cat
Blackbirds had been fattened with cheese
And flicked themselves back
Into foliage.  Jupiter glared and dipped
Down to horizon
And the cold closed over like
The lid of a trap.