Here is a poem called ‘Late Autumn’ and it was published in mid-2005 in America in an anthology called ‘The International Who’s Who In Poetry’.

In February 2005 I had gone to an International Poetry Convention in Orlando, Florida USA. I attended a very good workshop given by the American poet, Professor Grace Cavalieri. She advised us poets to regard ourselves as being like a high rise building, with each floor representing a year of our lives. She said most of us would find there were large ‘gaps’ about which nothing had been written, and they could be fertile ground for new poems.

My marriage was a bit of a ‘gap’ for me so I started filling it in with this poem ‘Late Autumn’.

Late Autumn
© Garth Dutton 2005

She gets home at twenty to six
and the autumn nights
are closing in quite visibly.
The sun now sets
when her train is half way from town.
The evening meal is set out on the table
as darkness falls.
The children and I
go to the gate to wait,
and to look at the garden in the twilight.
Many trees are leafless now,
but the guava trees
bear heavy crops of hard green fruit,
which ripen yellow as winter sets in.
The jacaranda shed its leaves last spring,
flowered as summer began,
and now keeps its leaves
while other deciduous trees
stand stark and bare.
The jacaranda and guava trees agree,
“It’s the seasons in South Australia
that are ridiculous,
not us.”