I have often felt that it was possible to know the day autumn arrived. Something different in the air, as though the earth had tilted in the night. Something different about the light; something that could not be explained or written down or fully understood. Perhaps sometimes poems are there for those places where there is nothing else, no other way of explaining. They are meditations on places which have not been explored or explained before.
Of course this is just my corner of that experience in Highland Scotland. Inevitably it would be different in however many other corners of the world. Yet that doesn't lessen the experience; somehow it almost makes it the more special, the more precious. Which comes back anyway to all that poetry means - surely.
PEARS
I think of that house in early evening
Somewhere at the end of summer
All the doors and windows open
Filled with the afterglow of sun
And the whole house heavy with the scent of pears.
There in the lawn that ancient tree
A hundred summers old, and maybe more,
Around it a deep, dark ring of pears.
I picked them hour after long hour
To thud into baskets, heavy and melting -
Leaving only the broken ones,
All drizzled and wandering with wasps,
And it was as if the house became some strange ship
I was filling for a long voyage
That the rest of our lives might be made of pears.
The poem comes from Kenneth Steven's collection Coracle, published by SPCK in London
