After The Summer Fayre Poem by C Richard Miles

Tattered bunting flutters in the breeze;
Balloons bobble limply on their strings
But milling masses only weakly wander
Idly squandering their last half hour.

Enervated by the tiresome trudge
From booth to booth, the hapless punters
Prowl like tired, uninterested lions
That have already hunted and fed.

One or two may pick at a morsel,
Price reduced, to clear a shabby stall
Whose bored stallholders stand there waiting
For permission to pack up, go home.

The fast-fading fete awaits its fate,
The clearing away of unsold junk
Dumped in a dustbin, skip or black bag
Or consigned to attics one more year.

And, as a solitary plastic bag
Drifts across the flattened, trodden grass
And the last car drives off, I hear sighs
From the field to claim it was not fair.

It had no choice, it remonstrates;
It wanted quiet rest beneath the gentle sun
To grow its green and ripen into grain;
It did not care for trampling, careless feet.

And yet it knows that it gave pleasure
For a few short hours to folk who came
And tasted summer, threw aside the world
In its green oasis in the city’s desert whirl.