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SUMMER TIME
This poem was witten by my best friend, Chris Proudfoot, who I had the pleasure of knowing from 1962 (when we began grammar school together) until Chris’s suicide in 2022.
a hot, still July afternoon,
silence unbroken
through a cordon of dusty nettles
you plunge into a rank glade,
wicked with the scent of elder
and warm, ripe grass,
heavy with anticipation of something not quite definable
it is high summer, just on the turn
as the last red campion falls to usurping rosebay,
and autumn though still distant,
slips into consciousness in an early yellowed leaf
light fails noticeably earlier now,
and as the stars fade in
and glowing planets begin their slow circling of the sky,
anticipation is irrelevant; at the moonrise hour
the memory goes back, instead, down the long, long years.
seconds, minutes, hours, days,
weeks, months, seasons, years —
how could the waxing and waning , rising and setting
moon
