Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sue Norton

 

 

 

Summer’s End

Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.

I’ve started to write notes to myself:
Shut bathroom window. Lock back door.
Yesterday at the bank I couldn’t remember

mini statement but I can recognise
this orange blur, this hover of wings
above abelia grandiflora, a hummingbird

hawk moth exploring the tube-flowers
with its long tongue. I sip my coffee.
Old age comes tapping up my garden path

on unsteady feet, but I’m content to watch
a flycatcher flitting up and back, up
and back to its perch on the fence post,

the hawk moth probing
trumpet by trumpet as it siphons
nectar’s last drops,

the flycatcher fluttering up to snatch
one more feed at summer’s end,
preparing for migration.

 

 

Sue Norton has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies.

Simon Williams

What were these fairies called
before we knew of hummingbirds?
Bumblebee moth because of the size?
Reed-nose moth because of the proboscis?

Daniel Sluman

just as the night sky shifts
beyond the minds

of the animals outside

the ceilings
we are pressed beneath change

in aspect & colour

Farah Ali

Notes from nature on how to survive this:
 
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
 
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches