Autumn Leaves

As I write this we are fast approaching bonfire night.   All around the country people are heaping up leaves, twigs and acorns and buying Sparklers.

If you follow my Instagram posts you will have noticed that I love the myriad forms and colours of autumn. This is the season I enjoy the most and perhaps it is no coincidence that November is my birthday month.

There are many beautiful poems about this season including Louis MacNeice’s wonderful Autumn Journal IV in which he describes a woman, with whom I identify strongly, –

“Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,

Whose nature prefers

Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place”.

But my favourite poem for the last trimester of the year is by Laurence Binyon, entitled ‘Now is the time for the burning of the leaves’.   If you don’t know it look it up.  It captures the sights and smells of autumn so vividly as the poet contemplates summer’s passing, the coming of winter and the eternal promise of spring.