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Old foggy fill-dyke, stunted and mardy,
Limping in the wet lanes, stirring up the slush,
Hirpling down the garden-ways where Spring’s creeping tardy -
Blind buds a-swither on the wind-whipped bush:
Oh you’re in a shocking mood, skimpy old curmudgeon,
Glum old hypochondriac, moaning schizophrenic,
Muddying the grassy bank and snuffling in your dudgeon -
Neither fish nor fowl you are, and scarcely photogenic.

Surly old impostor with hasty glance to ogle
(Oh but you’re a cynic, and a sharper from your birth!)
Moment’s smile, a pinch of guile, then like a grinning bogle
Spinning snows about you to obliterate the earth!
Branches are brown where you touch them with your finger -
Sodden shards of autumn glint dull beneath your moon:
Frostings from the morning, how you bid them lie and linger,
As you shuffle by the window in the failing afternoon.

You suck from the soul of me the spirit to be stirring -
I cower beneath the blanketing, and shiver at the rain,
Mazed with your mood-swings, your fading and recurring,
Sudden bright, then frost-by-night and all’s-to-do-again!
Oh you are a riever, brazen bird-deceiver,
Grinding gaberlunzie of dull and heavy bag:
Oldsters will have naught of you, children hate the thought of you,
Fretting under dripping eaves through Saturdays that lag.

Keep to the yard then, grimy old intruder,
You’ll muddy-up the front porch, dampen all the floor,
Soughing out your tale of woe, schemer and a brooder,
Holding back the sun from them who weary for it sore:
Grumbling, halting palmer, unwanted and unbidden,
Stumbling forth from South to North, fugitive from ship,
Strange and secret wayfarer under a doubtful heaven,
Earth’s old breathless miracle crammed tight within your scrip!

© Colin Bailey, February 2007