October

Today, we’re excited to bring you the first in a new series of blogs.

Our very own Anne Woodcock has written a poem about each month of the year.

Below is ‘October’.

Be sure to check back next month for November!

OCTOBER
Autumn 2018

Octoberfest must celebrate
Life while it lasts, with manic zest,
Before the frost with icy kiss
Lays the golden harvest waste,
Blasting all the tracery
Of pumpkin tendrils, stems and leaves,
Tomato towers of foliage,
And lush rosettes of lettuces
To devastation – shrivelled, brown,
All hope of further harvest gone.

Octoberfest: time to carouse,
For mankind sprees in plenteousness,
Like hordes of wasps inebriate –
In desperate, frenzied giddiness,
On every windfall they have crawled
And gorged on each fermenting husk –
Men live for now and to excess,
Oblivious to the creep of dusk;
We are, though day is chilling fast,
Consumed with our Octoberfest.

But as October strips the woods,
Smart squirrels dart in steady toil,
Intent on gathering their stores
To stash away beneath the soil;
They sense the season in decline,
The advent of the year’s nadir;
The slender opportunity
For harvest soon will disappear;
With not a moment to be lost,
They put on hold Octoberfest.

When winter bursts upon the scene,
With pelting rain and freezing blast,
The flimsy corpses of the wasps
Are pulverised to weightless dust;
But, nourished by their hidden hoard,
The squirrels, warm with pulse and breath,
Lie cosily in dens and dreys,
Buttressed and braced against cold death,
Like those who know the spring must come,
Consigning winter to the past –
And then will be the perfect time
To celebrate Octoberfest.