Spectator Competition: Lines on the leaves

In Competition 3374 you were invited to write an ode to autumn. There was bathos amid the beauty. I regret not finding room for Alan Millard’s ‘Season of musts’, Elizabeth Kay’s garden musings, Joseph Houlihan’s paean to the blazing hills, Nicholas Lee on what Keats could do with ‘rotting vapes arranged about the scene’, and this from Anca Gramaticu: ‘a flock of leaves took their flight/ In a roar of applause’. Finally, there’s just space for Daniel Galef’s poem in full: ‘The first leaf that falls –/ That takes balls.’ Those below win £25.

Supposing autumn to be a country doctor
In his vintage russet car and wholemeal tweeds,
Prescribing to both plutocrat and pauper.

Splendid reassurance at his brusque arrival,
Attention burnishes his patients and their needs,
Life ripening where there’s doubt of survival.

His voice is fruity, his bedside manner easy
A first frost’s clarity he brings to signs he reads:
His diagnoses, Latin gilded, he keeps breezy.

Departing, his tail lights show a hopeful glimmer,
As of last light flickering through leaf-stripped trees.
Well past nightfall, at his last call, there’s a shiver.

Adrian Fry

Autumn, it’s your turn to shimmy,
To whirl and to skirl, and to settle,
To whistle your way through the chimney,
Like a sudden and untoward kettle –
To dance your erratic mazurka
Down careless, meandering streams
And sometimes, when acting berserker,
And playing your role to extremes,
Throwing gusts with a happy abandon,
So that children are all in a pickle,
Or find that they’ve no legs to stand on –
Ah, you are notoriously fickle,
The season that heats up or freezes,
That suns all the paths in the park,
Before acting up just as it pleases,
To hurry us home in the dark.

Bill Greenwell

Season of crisp golden leaves
And hidden dog turds,
Of changing all the clocks,
Of migrating birds.

Season of squirrels storing nuts,
And conkers galore.
Of ignoring trick-or-treaters
Knocking at the door.

Season of scrumptious berries
Being baked into pies,
Of folk building bonfires
Before burning their guys.