Autumn Leaf-fall

 

Leaf-fall:
vibrant, vivid,
flaming, falling, rustling, dying,
multi-coloured woven carpet:
Autumn.

(Cinquain poem)
5 Lines – not rhyming
1st line – a noun, 2 syllables
2nd line – 2 adjectives descriing the noun, 2 syllables each
3rd line – 3 “……ing”words describing noun, 2 syllables each
4th line – a 4 word phrase about the noun, 2 syllables each
5th line – another word for the noun, 2 syllables

Fungus Invasion

This year has been damp and a good year for fungus,
some are small and pretty and some are humongous,
some crowd in circles around the base of our trees
and some decorate their trunks right up to their knees.

Some look quite cute, almost with friendly faces,
some dark and threatening, crowd in other places,
some look like phallic symbols, some like fairies’ hats,
some look like they should live with Dracular and bats.

Toadstools grow in circles but I have looked to see,
and there’s no sign that I can find of a fairy.
Mushrooms should be good this year, but I’m scared to try
any that I find in woods as I’m passing by.

We’ve been invaded this year with all sorts of spores,
they’re multiplying over the ground in their scores.
Ash trees have been struck with a fungus invasion,
spores from foreign woods have ruined England’s equation.

I feel like I’m living on another planet:
everywhere I go the grass is soggy and wet,
fungi cover the ground in woods everywhere
and I have to step all around them with great care.

I don’t want my dogs to catch a fungus disease,
just like the one that’s killing our native ash trees.

 

Ash tree die back report from the Telegraph

Dog disease caused by fungus


Aunt Molly’s Rabbits

“He is such a rambunctious varmint, that pesky fox,” said Aunt Molly, “he’s fair chewed his way through the roots of my cherry tree, and I never get any cherries any more these days.”

“Mind you, the reticulation of the ablaqueated roots of that tree has been used as a hiding place for the bunch of rabbits he’s been after, so it could have been caused by them already.”

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All set for Christmas

Monica looked around her sitting room, satisfied. Everything sparkled and twinkled.

The frosted silver fairies hanging above the windows of her patio doors were gently twirling between the loops of silver beads which all glistened with a multitude of reflections from the lights above them. The fibre-optic twig tree which was standing on her sideboard, covered with silver tinsel and white frosted icicles, was twinkling away. The lights on the mantlepiece nestled amongst the branches cut from her yew tree in the garden, where she had placed robins and chaffinchs on fir branches with “snow” covered cones, around her model of an Alsation dog.

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