Twelfth Night

(a particularly dreary day following Christmas 2008. The day seemed worn out and not bothered).


Like a blot set in a subdued grainy haze,
the afternoon’s later sullen moonlight
deems to throw a silver burnish on the remnants
of a day of disappointing gloom.
Through the grimy weather-beaten windowpane.
distant winks from house lights shimmer
in pulsating snowflake shapes.
Higher still, the day’s last cackle of cantankerous rooks,
mute on stamped and trampled leafless, bony roosts.
Below the swirling palls of matted, long dead autumn leaves,
skit from shrub to shrub, as if to hide and seek,
within brittle, lifeless twigs.
A broken terracotta pot lolls to and forth alone,
a seesaw ride, arcing the riven path.
Inside the warming hearth’s aglow,
with breathy, licking flames that fight,
a canon of booming gusts, thrown down the flue,
hissing dissent, within their arsenal of sappy logs.
Tilted, forlorn, undressed, a ravaged yuletide tree,
shivers, discarded and hastily forgotten,
but yet, bathed serenely in this night’s argent beams,
and quiet, presents its own sublime epiphany.

© Graham Sherwood 12/2009

Copse

(I vividly recall seeing this ghastly coloured sky being clawed at by a small clutch of trees. Like children grabbing at sweets).

So many thoughtless dilute brushstrokes
smear the milky, feverish sky today,
and jaundiced clouds torn right down,
dragged low by clenched oak knuckles,
stark and skeletal
in stagnant green and putrid brown.
Oddly threadbare beeches
having felt the razor edge
of November’s slavering blade,
now stand inert
as nature’s forlorn mannequins.

© Graham Sherwood 12/2009