Reliving The Calendar Poem by Richard George

It was our last summer in the village
and flycatchers nested
in the eaves of our garden shed.
I was mad that year:
I could have been William Cowper
(bar the scansion) . I wrote diaries.
I seemed at one with light,
transparent, still as Buddha,
feeling the ripeness
of June, July's intensity
in ways as inexpressible
as mirrors to the blind.
I could smell the oily sepia
of the shed's lumberjack timbers,
and listen to the creosote behind
the bower they flashed out
and back from, placating Void.
'There are no years in Nature,
only seasons, and summers'
I wrote, and scrunched it up. Rubbish.
Spotted Flycatcher...
They will be building in Tikrit,
and Mosul, and Baghdad.
They will hear all the notes
in the octave of spices,
and the heat will bloom honey-thick,
coagulating. Bombs
will fire them into the dust,
their hearts will crack, and Void
will open its beak, and swallow them.
And Cowper's hares will run, and run, and run
from Sanity with weapons.