The night time air grows still, chilled

The sun now well below the horizon

Children lie snugly in tidy beds and cots

Quiet, slumbering from a day of work and play

 

Grown-ups nod in the firelight’s glow

A ginger cat toasts his whiskers

Draped across the hearth

Like a discarded feather boa

 

Outside the black tom cat

Spits at a lone rust-coated fox

Who prowls its way around the chicken coop

To escape, squeezing through a gap in the hedge

 

Lit by the moon, a shapely Hawthorne tree

Stiffened by the cool air, stretches

Bending a branch, it begins to scratch

At an awkward spot, where it's blossom tickles

 

Slowly the tree opens an eye, a second follows

Both of deep brown, edged with eyelashes of dark thorns

The outer bark grows warm

Shades of rose, show up his life blood

 

The Hawthorne has great age, which has brought power

At night he becomes filled with life

Then begins to correct the ills, that man has wrought

In another day of abusing the earth

 

His work is unending

His task impossible,

Unknown and unappreciated

But he will never stop