simonhlilly

INVITATION

Come, come whilst the woods are green and golden.
Days crumble and fall, a burnished bracken,
A tremble of cobwebs.
They tumble and cascade, ripened and rotten,
A glorious ferment, a willed and wanted collapse.

The roof-tops in the forest,
Moss covered, dripping:
A kind of amicable silence,
A shared solitude
Threaded with birdsong.

Our scars, our pains, show
How we have become ourselves.
They are the maps that have brought us here.
In these pools of silence
Put them aside, fall, forget.

Come into cloud silences, the tumbling breezes.
In early morning, a slow drifting time,
The calligraphy of bats above the feeding sheep.
Where distance comes and goes,
The river’s voice everywhere and nowhere.
The long, pink dawn stretching low,
Rolled out on bird wings,
The green gold of valley oaks.

Come, before the days grow too short,
Before the fords deepen and run so fast.
The still soft light of woodland,
Bramble, bracken, willowherb that browns and thins.
And the dead risen up in their Sunday hats:
They sit in circles and talk endlessly
Of the past that we are become.

Come if you are homesick for woodsmoke,
For a slow, unwinding road,
A symphony of edges,
A breathed rhythm,
An enfoldment, a rapture,
An end and a beginning of stories.
A little time away.
A time given back to the world.
To be unnoticed, camoflaged, melted,
Drowned sweetly, the waves of autumn.

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