Ode to Spring

October's flourishes are dried to must,

And ice comes carried sharp by wind. The sun,

Strikes ground refreshed and brisk with dust,

Before maturing grasses from the mud.

Broken capricious watercolour clouds

Let evening's palette-melted warmth unfold,

Turning the fingertips of branches brown,

Bruising the naked sky with blue and gold.

The time-cut trunks round shadowed churches crack ,

And moss and holly strangle bricks and creep

Around Victorian cobwebbed, sugar-glass.

Cement and polythene entrap the weeds.

You ask me what a man is – I say he's heat.

And you know it. And his heart billows like

Powdered cirrus, or wind weaved through the wheat

Drowning the sensual afternoons of light.

Ask me what a man is – I say he's earth.

Dense generations hot in buried dirt,

Where darkness moistens roots in fertile filth

Before awakened shoots are born and burnt.