Autumn Comes

Colours: gold, orange, red, brown, yellow, and rust.
Leaves drifting, floating, falling, crunchy and crisp.
Weather misty, moisty, dewy, foggy, damp and cold with sudden shafts of golden sunlight
Fruits, conkers, many berries – black, rowan, hip, haws, hazelnuts, acorns
Bracken, orange gold, yellow, green, beige and brown
Toadstools: many and various
Cobwebs everywhere, morning dew covered
Hedgehogs rustling in the hedgerows, fattening up for winter
Indian summer – golden October
Birds migrating. Mammals hibernating.

When summer’s had its all
Then it’s time for leaves to fall
Days of lesser light
Colder, longer nights
Hedgehogs hiding in leafy dens

Third season days of lesser light
Herald the return of colder, longer night
Hedgehogs rustling in the hedgerows
Falling leaves of orange, gold and yellow
Misty, moisty, cheek-chilled morning
Just tumbled from bed, still yawning
Nature’s treasures waiting for all
Bright shiny conkers, boy late for school
Red and black berries hanging in bunches
Toadstool peeping from crunchy carpet of leaves
Cobwebs, morning dew covered, freshly weaved
A season of pleasure
Rich in nature’s treasure

And The Sheep

Yesterday we drove through the moor
The quiet, windswept brown moor
With purple sedges and sheep-mown edges
Switchback, one track, roads overhung with hedges
Overhead and left pillows and banks of cloud, pale mid-grey
While to the right, black edged, dark grey threatened the day
Silence stretched across the vast endless tracts of moorland
No buildings, no pollution, untouched by man’s hand
Broken only by the sigh of the wind flying by
And the far distant cry of a bird from the sky
And the beck forever running, never tiring
Chuckling, burbling its delight, and us admiring
From our precarious position, our frailties and numbered days
His endless song, his enduring strength and pretty ways
And the sheep…

Written in Wetherby for Geoff Burgess