After the storm

Fickle autumn

Season of swinging contradictions

Battle front.

King Summer will make his final stand.

Sometimes regaining lost ground,

In a delicious, futile sortie of golden sunshine.

Devious Winter mounts a covert, insidious assault,

A nocturnal raid of sweeping gales, icy rain.

The world awakens naked and bare,

Suddenly bereft of its colourful finery,

Revealed knobbly-legged, skeletal.

Left to mourn its own protracted, inevitable death.

Regretting the riotous orgy of oranges and reds;

The colourful masquerade melts into memory.

Regard now the sorry, stripped-down self,

Stark grey-brown, petrified,

Imprisoned under a billowing, steely, intransigent sky,

Pregnant with icy crystals,

Its ally, the taunting, conquering, restless north wind.

The conquered landscape retreats

Into somnolent submission

Until

The first sleepy snowdrop foot soldiers

Are summoned

Through the strawlike grass and leaf litter

By an urgent sun

Who clamours:

It is time to rebuild the kingdom.