MAY

When Bounty Is Down to Persimmons and Lemons

(from “The Idyll Wheel”)

In May, Mary’s month,

when snakes go to sleep,

sunlight and shade lengthen,

forest grows deep,

wood coughs at the axe

and splinters hurt worse,

barbed wire pulls through

every post in reverse,

old horses grow shaggy

and flies hunker down

on curtains, like sequins

on a dead girl’s ball gown.

Grey soldier-birds arrive

in flickers of speed

to hang upside down

from a quivering weed

or tremble trees’ foliage

that they trickle down through.

Women’s Weekly summer fashions

in the compost turn blue.

The sun slants in under things

and stares right through houses;

soon pyjamas will peep, though,

from the bottoms of trousers.

Night-barking dogs quieten

as overcast forms

and it rains, with far thunder,

in queer predawn storms;

then the school bus tops ridges

with clay marks for effort,

picking up drowsy schoolkids,

none of them now barefoot,

and farmers take spanners

to the balers, gang ploughs

and towering diesel tractors

they prefer to their cows.