Look and see three trees

Wind blows silent leaves

Fall is almost there

Elegant song thrush

Speckled breast, long slender legs

Snail’s worst enemy

Earth.

With every sense alive at once,
Her hands plunged in the earth.
Its ripe and crumbly brownness,
Ploughing grooves across its girth.

Since she was young, a thousand summers,
Grew a crop for tea.
A child’s evening spent with aprons,
Bent on bended knee.

Nostrils filled with pungent heads,
Mushroom’s heady scents,
Darkened, ferny corridors,
Autumn fairy tents.

Tea leaves stained her china,
Fat moths full of dreams.
Tattered lace of lullabies,
Loved, now never seen.

And as the loam is squeezing
Through her mottled, gnarly hands,
Memories and textures
Turn keys in time-lost lands.

Her faithful Ted so threadbare,
His matted fur gone flat.
Squashed, one eyed and stitches loose,
Beneath her piebald cat.

She knows there have been rainbows,
But sees through rheumy eyes,
These sepia toned reminders,
Of how this earth is wise.

LW