All seasons transcend
Since each day differs
Through its cloud and its sun.
 
In the wood, gold spreads
Slowly
Like the slow death it is
As every soft colour is returned.
Only pasture remains green
Below mist
While brown earth is broken
By plough:

Sufficiency is shelter itself
And the once reluctant farmer nods
As he turns with his bent back
Where sun rests
Between its hill and his home.
It will be gone, soon, this sun
Lost
While stars stare down the sky
Where for fifty years
His house has stood
Stone grey among muddy sheep-torn grass.

There was a horse, then,
To plough the steep slope
Of his hill: a different way
When even the village
Fifteen furlongs west
Was wary of all change.
 

But shelter is sufficiency itself
He knows
As he walks the short path
To his home.
There will be fire,
A son's warm wife
To welcome this leathery skin.
 
He is old, he knows,
Worn like the oak, and his path
Which three years of bloody hands
Tore from Her earth
And which each year She renews.

All rain can be smelt

In the wood, wind spins
Slowly, like Earth.
There is a mist, a mingling
While the fallen man waits among leaves
Like Her kestrel
For death.

Every wind is his breath.

DW Myatt