Dartmoor

She said

Autumn came to die

Upon moorland bedside,

Parting the poppy flanked tide,

Cerise cradled petals

Breathlessly noosed

To the weave webbed tug

Of November’s cryptic movements

Towards a flake salted earth.

October will soon rouse

Her firestorm tragedies

In straddling waves,

The nostril steam and sepia fog

A shrouded processional

From wild horses parading a bolted conquest

Amidst the battering ram of razored rain,

Indenting valleys to an asymmetrical wasteland,

And how viciously soon

Shall stone bone trees

Be powdered and masked

In December’s endless coughs of mists and snow.

These Black Down Hills

Will surrender their thinned shoulders

To the splattering blots

Of doom eyed magpie flocks,

Singing thundering flaps

With winged newspaper spread

Cutting a heavenward arrow

Bounded but dull,

Littering the darkened loom

Tasked to them,

Through jaded skies

Voided of sun,

A blood moon eye

Etherised and sinking past derelict horizon.

I came to England

But left my heart in Dartmoor.