Thought for the Week: Dying fall
'Dying fall' by UA Fanthorpe
November’s leaves flock ginger and stiff along the gutter,
Waiting for the wind to say.
Boots (black), shoes (brown), knee-socks (white).
Their feet speak for them:
Brownies and cubs (eyes left to grin at Mum),
WRVS, swinging arms whose baskets we know,
Guides, Scouts, Sea Scouts, all different, all tweaked
Into step by the bully band,
And the band’s irresistible, dammit. I choose not to conform,
I don’t want to fight, but by jingo jingo jingo…
Thin irregular pipe of peace, please. Not this rude
Heartbeat that fuses us all
With the bowler-hatted grey shufflers and their hulking flag,
Grasped cack-handed in a gauntlet,
And the washed dim names that no one remembers,
Who died in a muddle of bugle-calls
And the fitful drumbeat of glory,
Ending up, like the leaves, in mud,
Skulls, tongueless bells, miming their message,
Waiting for the wind to say.
UA Fanthorpe
1929-2009
‘Dying Fall’ was first published in Safe as Houses (Peterloo Poets, 1995).
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