This weeks poem is taken from The Collected Poems by Elizabeth Jennings.
Song at the Beginning of Autumn Now watch this Autumn that arrives In smells. All looks like Summer still; Colours are quite unchanged, the air On green and white serenely thrives. Heavy the trees with growth and full The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere. Proust who collected time within A child's cake would understand The ambiguity of this - Summer still raging while a thin Column of smoke stirs from the land Proving that Autumn gropes for us. But every season is a kind Of rich nostalgia. We give names - Autumn and Summer, Winter, Spring - As though to unfasten from the mind Our moods and give them outward forms. We want the certain, solid thing. But I am carried back against My will into a childhood where Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke; I lean against my window fenced From evocations in the air When I said Autumn, Autumn broke.