This was prompted, in a weird way, by Keats' To Autumn ...
The bicycle
Pens down; it’s funeral week. The walkers hew
a clear-sight track, straight through the wheat field, past
the footbridge which the summer stun-girl threw
her bike off, on the shortening squint-bright last
good day of August. Puddles brown the farm
car park where families scan the apple fayre
for ritual, while a distant smoke alarm
unsettles even the most debonair
of silver-haired consultants in retreat –
another apple falls to earth, to eat.
The woods don’t breathe for dens half-made, those spring
escapes to in-between world, long before
the purple sky rose like a flood chasing
a holed hulk off a dried-out mudflat’s floor,
to bathe a skate boy’s late girl in her choice
of dead ends. Quick commuters now reflect
they’d heard her pure and unaccepting voice
send echoes through the underpass, unwrecked,
as yet, unspoiled, as yet, by freeze and fall.
They know her naiad face, her siren call.
It’s funeral week. Dried flowers rack the rails
beside the road bridge. Trains crawl in, delayed
by on-line strays from loosely tied hay-bales,
the first free gales of winter’s ghost parade.
A nonplussed uncle sniffs the small-town drain
as soon as he steps to the taxi rank.
He stops. The town, the season, his again,
the open summer roads, the gods he’d thank.
The season, the quiet cries of her despair,
the town, the bicycle that went nowhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment