More Squirrels in The Elms

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Written December 2012

Vll  Scrabble

Seven tiles selected, to be assembled
Into words on the board where you must follow cue
At right angles on an upright with a cross-bar;
One for aye and five for Kay
And there she goes, rearranging jumbled letters,
Juggling, and first making sense in the mind;
Intent on setting the record straight
Trying this and that in the shuffle,
With paving stones laid out and heading for the corners
With their triple word scores and loud cheers,
Rejoicing as she takes the lead and four more tiles
To spell Ess, cue, eye, are, are, eeh, ell,
So she gets a fifty point Bingo
And I see my name on the board.
 
                                                                                     Vlll   Branch Roads
 
  We’ve chosen the side roads
  Narrowing into foliage where the sun strikes through
  In the dappling of afternoon shadows,
  So we can stop for the high-up view
  Surveying what’s below and distant
  Stretching to the horizon as the path peters out,
  Limited only by our own quadrangle,
  Onwards and outwards until the branch stretches
  Into a twig that extends to the edge,
  And we’re challenged to a bungee-jump
  Leap into the unknown without a harness - 
  Beachy Head survival of the fittest,
  Finding another road, for another journey
  That makes us prepare to start all over again.
 
lX   Autumn
 
Mists descend as temperatures plummet
And leaves fall in oranges and browns;
The sun travels low in the sky
As the metabolic rate drops,
Preparing to switch off for winter.
So let’s have one last fling,
Dashing under the blanket of leaves -
Adam and Eve under cover
Nestling down in the burrow,
Tails flapping and paws patting each other
With eyes half-closed and ready for dreams,
Only to find the other half has arrived
With a tray of tea, saying
It’s good morning, not good night.
 
                                                                                     X   Motorways
 
  A, B and M roads feed into each other
  As trunk roads and motorways link up
  In overlapping pathways of transmission –  
  Interlocking networks of communication
  Bewailing the loss of rail-track
  With Bradshaw’s journeys curtailed,
  Not just for a weekend’s engineering
  To lop off overhanging branches,
  But gone forever with their coal and steam
  That puffed pollution over a protected countryside
  Over which HGVs and SUVs career,
  Banned by a Central London embargo,
  Leaving us to clasp the bark of our tree trunk
  Frozen by the siren of another ambulance.
 
X1   Security Alert
 
Lining the bunker, ready for radiation,
Fallout of terror and a nuclear attack;
MI5 warrens taken over for war,
Defending ourselves against the indefensible
With a few drops of water, and a blanket
For the long lockup after the blast,
The expected Armageddon and countdown to survival;
Chernobyl revisited up staircases to nowhere
And a roundabout on deserted playgrounds,
But all we have is a temperature drop,
A few flakes of snow on the Anderson Shelter
While we’re cuddled up together,
Bedded down like bulbs awaiting spring
When the nucleus opens and bursts into life.
 
December 2012
 
After Squirrels in the Elms, Margaret requested yet more verse about her friends in the quadrangle of The Elms - our housing estate in Bromley, Kent.

_{Image:
Eastern Grey Squirrel - From Wikipaedia - Tom Friedel}