This is the season
when time dips its wings
and calls back its black shroud
of night,
tying tight corners around
the wuthering day,
the muted heart.

This is the cold breath of year
when days are dogged by damp
and dark,
when leaves fall and trees stand bare
and bleak
before the fallowing sun.

This is nature’s repose.

Let the roots that bind me
to the season
follow its call
into deeper paths,
finding succour in the stillness,
rest in the emptying days.

The rain is steady.
Grey holds the day
between its cold shoulders.
Time is slowing
as leaves sow themselves
onto the ground,
waiting to turn into earth again.

The trees burn softly,
their scarlet and gold embers
smoulder,
firing the passions of summer.
Others are already bare,
blackened branches
against the hearth of sky.

Even the crows are quiet,
no longer striping the air
with their cries.

We are all returning,
sinking into soil
as the sun lowers and leaves.

The sun is a bowl
holding heat on my skin
like love,
soaking into my bones,
into my mood
like balm.

My knots unravel,
my pressures melt away.

I am butter, oozing.
I am apple pie,
peeled and baked and brown.

I have brought all of me
on holiday,
my toes, my tears, my ears,
the whole package
so we can each unwind.

This is meditation,
my mind not chasing plans,
past and future folded away,
just the glorious, sun-filled
present.

Today
the sky is filled with cloud,
not a blanket grey
that hugs the sky close
so the air seems dimmed
by the bruise of it,
but a duvet of down
in tumbling clusters of grey
and walkways of white,
clotting and frothing
like foam, like cream,
a sheet of cotton wool
spread overhead
to mop up the spilled sun,
scrunched from its spun silver
like cold candyfloss.

Here the airs meet,
cold and warm sliding past each other,
shivering the water vapour
into dribs and droplets
like frosted breath.
They are the face of the sky,
crumpled and creased today
but tomorrow they may be
new-blown white,
sailing sheep grazing my skin
with cold feet,
or purple and pink pashminas,
the colour of cocktails
in the evening sun.
Tomorrow they may be gone
leaving a baby-blue sky,
sweet-smelling, bare-skinned
and new-born,
bright with light and promise.

Clouds are my measure
of the bounty of the day.
Clouds are my weather.

Give me a feather bed
to lounge the winter in
and a down duvet
to snuggle to my ear.

I hear the snow
will be deep this year
and the dark-eyed nights full of frost.

I will be at home
under wraps,
safe as a cygnet
swathed in swoons of swan down.

I will enjoy the snow
through the curtain, beyond the window,
muffling and hiding my home.

I will hear the rain
tinkling and tickling the trees,
the dark trees
beyond the pool of my light.

I have serious business to undertake,
in my folds, in my feather-nest,
dreaming the spring into being.