Antlers

I knew I'd be back down to Petworth, the first free, sunny day and when the sun was streaming through the window this morning I decided the book could wait until this aft so jumped in to the Jeep with dogs and able assistant/tripod carrier. There was little wind and the hardest part of the morning was avoiding rampant males - not deer, but other snappers with their tripods!

Cue new gallery. It was hard to choose between my three favourites - a happy family, a panning shot of a running buck, and this lordly chap who won out for the way he held his head and the definition of his antlers against the shadow. I think that's it with deer for a while - until it snows. Petworth Park is beautiful in the snow.

We went around the house which has one of the best collections of Turners anywhere - he had a studio there for a while. One of his paintings shows the ancestors of these fallow deer in the grounds some 300 years ago.

Oh, I nearly forgot the poem I'd been threatening to do on autumn leaves etc. I was toiling on this until 2 am last night. I'm happy with it now. It's called:


Eviction

Father autumn dons his purple cloak
And coughs a hesitant good night,
Banging his gnarled gavel, nailing season's end.
Bare all the branches, shutter the nuts and fruits,
Neuter the stamen, spay the pistil,
Leave not a twig unbent, a vein untapped,
Or axil soaked in sap, or shoot unspent.
Lever the pine stylus from its groove,
Fading summer's euphoric arboreal rave,
The bugs have lost their jitter, damsels weep,
And beetles split, diving their separate ways,
In hibernation or decomposing grave, or
Swearing fealty to adolescent queens.

The acer and the maple strut a final tango,
Smouldering terrene and drama at the death,
Yielding now to winter's frozen breath,
Layering and misting field and forest,
Veiling valley, moor and mountain top,
In stillness and stormy raids, ridding,
Clinging, unrecorded casualties,
The tardy, drunken gatecrashers,
Barely dressed and scant prepared,
Put to the sword, a coup de grace,
With tendrils severed, roots clipped.

A government dethroned, unfrocked,
Turned out in hoar frost reception,
Bounced in to rutted paths, iron-viced,
Scattered pitiless, the broken, glabrous sheets,
Deltas emptied of vascular life,
Decaying, spent and brittle brown,
Littering lanes, unwanted, lost, quite dead.
Their hosts, exposed and quieted, hushed
For dark months of confinement,
Dimmed but not defeated,
Building confidence and strength,
Awaiting the bugle call of spring's campaign.