Sedgeford October With Winter Geese

"Sedgeford October With Winter Geese." The full photoshoot for the cover artwork is below. You can read and hear the poem in its glorious digitally recorded autumn collage at the link above. 

A corner of a Norfolk field that is forever Europe. And one of the loveliest corners of England. 

Sedgeford October



somewhere mellow between

the end of the overblown blackberries

and

the start of the harvested leaves

fused flies

on clinical sills

hint at bleached sun

and

in the hedges

thistle winds to come


to eyes trained on histrionic heights

of Welsh adolescence,

this stubborn serenity,

these mediaeval colours

are

endlessly reassuring:

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole

wild chords of geese in its folds;

the flinty, dependable noun

behind mists of adjectives


Just noticed that I missed out October in my Poem of the Month this year. So I'll sneak it in here and hope I get away with it. It's very much an end of October poem anyway, especially this year when it's been like the Costa del Sol half the time. This poem hung in our local Sedgeford pub for years and got read in another local pub (Ringstead's Gin Trap) this year. I'm putting together a calendar of Norfolk poems: this one will be very hard to shift off the October page.