Skeins

Shifting into soup mode / I crave hot buttered toast and tea, and pick up my knitting after 6 months off. Serve me / period dramas and thick socks, and the dickensian flicker of candles at 8pm.

Crystal rain on hypericum leaves gives me life / on my walk to work, I haul out Folklore again like I always do. I remember / being little and desperate to look at toy shop catalogues this time of year / no harm in starting a list a little early is there? 

Mum sends a text to say she's seen skeins of geese flying over this week / I got into bed last night and felt the chill of outside on my face from the open window, / dressing gown season has come again.

The yarrow has finished, the neon yellow has gone and died, but how I love the crispy upturned plates / of their seed heads, struck against a leaden sky. I rake leaves / endlessly, reds and greens and browns; a robin picks its way around the soil beside me, eyeing me / less than a foot away

I stare right back and feel that deep peace, you know / when you're right in nature watching it turn and change and decay and return / the year rolls on in the only way it knows how and we're dragged along with it, aren't we / with our coats on, ready for the new.