Yorkshire's Autumn-Winter Transition

Throughout the years these alternating hues of northern lands - blue-to-green-to-grey - have borne my faithful aureole of life And as I pause, caught within a dearth of clearer thought - my gaze blank upon the heather - I feel through blackening panes my Autumn - my thick'ning blood in tune I wish to be the stoutened oak - the giant Quercus, like a rock silhouetted purple under sun's wake; through the many generations it has claimed its rights o' land, become the land The background of my room flows in thermals; Elgar calms my inner ear; port hangs heavy on a weary hand, my faith soothes in cool robusto clouds In me, I'm never alone: I peer further: The way of Yorkshire stone - a never-ending path dissolving in the deathless fields; dry stone walls rise up thro' their lichen camouflage, line the lineage of Yorkshire's farmstead lives (reminding me that yonder hill, dale, moor and mind I'll die inside the nithered air of country wilds) At altitude where scale becomes a new perspective, enormity of evolution hovers in its empire of the skies: Tho' the red kite never smiles (except inside his head upon a kill) , I know he knows he's Lord - Aerial self-possession travels in his eye; he's on! to other realms to leave us in the dusk to shiver through the air's anticipation: Night: The scarred moon spreads out its yellowed silver, smudges paved strata honed from cloud; below, a hulk of Friesians somehow cozied up in their refrigerated cosmos, lashes hanging on the air - their en chamade of silence, mantra The last blue vestige bleeds black; a cutting breeze sharpens the bone, chills the marrow, deepens death Ice It's bloody cold beyond the South where all becomes the snow Yet my heart rests In Yorkshire's moors ‘n' dales subsumed below Copyright © Mark R Slaughter 2014