for a brief moment an autumn sky brokered the morning, blink and you might miss it… I didn’t blink, I didn’t miss it… and then all too soon it was gone consumed in a flat summer grey, the kind of grey only summer invites to the party, the kind that doesn’t know what to do with itself so just hangs around side-kicking invisible dust, hands in pockets, hood up, blank stare, forgetting to remember… something it forgot to remember… bleeding a lack of imagination… a single swallow sieved the sky for morning vagrants… the early bird gets the… moths in their case, daddy long-legs, tiny spider who spun a single strand of silk to take them up into the jet stream but first have to run the gamut of the swallows whiskers and keen turn of speed… last evening there were dozens making the most of the usual time of day feast flitting through clouds of unwary insects… I wonder if they consider being eaten, that they might be next… regardless it’s too late when they are become bird food, largely at the mouths of swallowing swallows gulping and swooping preparing for the journey which for some will be their first and will do without a second thought the thousands of miles migration they’ve never done or seen before but will do it anyway without question… autumn’s here but keeping a low profile… for now… only giving itself away at times it thinks no one is looking or paying attention as people generally don’t, being far too busy with their own tiny worlds to bother with the much bigger one they perch upon increasingly precariously-so…… I think it wants us to know it’s there though, waiting and sometimes not waiting, patient but cutting a sliver from the hem… it sees the threadbare, the ragged robins, the early fruits ripened far too soon, lost leaves, dead-heads, it notices every nuance with the discernment of an horologist for whom the balance is to the watch what the pendulum is to the clock……
© 2018 robert greig
