Bramble flowers in bud lower L and blossoming in background at top of picture.
AUTUMN COLOURS ON THE COAST
Composed 27th October while walking to Marloes Sands
What are the Autumn colours of Pembrokeshire…?
Hard to say,
When the weather’s so often four seasons in one day.
Sea, meadows, scrubland, rushy mere, rabblerock cliffs:
Everything colourjumps gecko fast
With each stark of sun,
Windromp cloud shadow,
Fleeting frass of hail!
Meanwhile what pleases most,
What will memory strongest
Come the stoveside evening’s ale sipping hour,
Are the calendar misfits of coastal botany:
These eye-treats now gale dancing
In the best of the raggedy banks –
Besides from the eternal, and so blessed for that,
Gorse blooms.
Late October clover,
In such cosy woolshop window colours;
Bitteryellow ragwort, still defying the scythe;
By the cliff path, gust-braving scabious
The same powder blue as we glimpse
Through rips in the low tide clouds.
And campion: our everywhere companion,
Any shade from pale baby pink
To an outrageous almost-beetroot.
For us, right on the coast,
The zest of spray-flinging beaches
Gale-salts our skins and windows and gardens;
Thus, no flaming displays of beeches, sycamores, or maples:
For even where we have those trees,
Fast they stripbare surrender all their leaves.
But always for us, and worth saying again,
The washed-air shine of gorse petals in morning sun.
And as for the sweetness of those flowers’ kisses –
A memory worth going out to gather,
Sure to cheer us through each leaden day ahead.
© Christopher Jessop 2020