The wood shed, tarred, corrugated,
with racked rakes and old twine.
To the robin, wood mouse and field vole, home.
Sawdusted shingle on the floor
soaks up the iron roof's cold splashes.
Their mother, the rain, hammers to borrow a small spade
to clear her childrens' path into the clay soil.
Instead they mass and run out of control
down the hill, before disappearing
through a fern-fringed grid into the earth below.
The woodshed waits quietly while the angry rain hammers,
drawing rust, over time.

2.Sun

Petrol strokes the still air.

Engine oil drips
to conserve the giant green cricket.
Once the fresh colour of early summer,
it hints at autumn or Egypt,
caught by its leg barbs
in a web of plastic pea nets.

Higher on a shelf,
a dried crust mud fringe,
made by a robin
and finished with fingers of straw,
locks the lid on a jar of rusting screws.

Dust is at home here,
footprinting the voles,
and laying siege to the bright paint
of the mower.

The sun corrugating, muscle-flexes
and a blue bottle spins like a break dancer.

3.Autumn

Walnuts, now safe from the squirrel,
have sweated off their tight green wet suits.
They lie wrinkled, foreign,in a sieve.

Here, hanging by a thread,
the fate of midges
is caught now and again by the low sun.

Honesty's seeds facet the little light
allowed in by tired leaves
and possessive spiders.     

Damp bags  of charcoal lie full
on the dusty floor and
yellowing polythene cracks.
A sweep's cheerful brush
drops the soot
that will do for talc

on the handle of the lawn rake
whose tips are now rusting red,
tynes like an old fan.

The petrol still smells smooth
and the scrappy elder tree