Into Winter
Rugby League again on our screens,
And a premonition of frost
In the accelerating dusk.
Down Tewkesbury back-lanes
Streetlamps wheeze asthmatically,
Haloed by the worsening gloom.
Car parks in Northway are already slick;
The stench off rubber wafts from the scrapyard,
Drains are smeared with pulp-black berries.
From the murk of suburban grove,
The pub glistens like some vast space station
Into which voyagers drift and dock
With no apparent reason.
Disco lights flash in Cheltenham,
But only a series of caricatures appear to dance.
Respectable girls fail to enhance
Their reputations on such floors,
According to a colleague at work,
Albeit the regular office bore.
Yet the pulse off life has certainly quickened,
The year hurries to a close.
Secret whispers tug at my mind,
Hint at rituals older’ than civilised time.
Others may yearn for summer,
I sense excitement at this year-close -
When fog reduces shape to silhouette,
And landscape to Cubist Art.
It is now I come closest
To primal thrill, to
The poem’s heart.
Page(s) 13
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