The days of stormy autumn come

Mother, child, brother, son,

Memories, like dust, infest my eyes, 

Swirling, like a Turner sky,

Like water under wind,

Mixing greys and blacks and whites and blues,

Chiaroscuro, tussling these monochromes

Into the piebald heavens above.

Below, girls in mucky summer dresses,

Boys with unruly mothers,

Fathers absent, except in dreams,

Where do all the day’s shadows go?

September’s BlackBerrying holds us still

Down languorous lanes leading only to this:

A dance with winter’s handmaiden's bleeding hands,

Freezing the ice crystals of the mind;

With words, stripped bare of all the human heart endures.