Scents and sounds flow from the little cottage,
airs and tunes charge the atmospheric guage,
and whispers of smoke stray and assuage
weathered thatch and chimney’s heritage.
The red-sandstone building blocks on the moor;
a boot-trodden stone step protects the floor,
wind-planed wood forming windows and door,
secure guardians against the windy score.

Inside: the hot hearth with its singing fire,
bellows puffed within the domestic pyre –
warming the hungry feline dame and sire,
while, warily, the mouse creeps to his byre.
The clock tocks: “mobilis in ‘immobile'”,
patient pedant in clockwork: no sun-dial.

Enter the cottage, stepping on granite;
none of that muse-less, man-made concrete;
aged and walked to warm neutral greyness.
The rich cousin to the clerical mouse
reaches safety and hides within the blackness,
fast, prisoner in domestica’s house.
The finecky feline at the fireside
kneads a front paw, in a worried aside.

On the wall, on either side of the hearth,
there are four pictures, two and two, of Earth
pictured minute through the Four Seasons.
The breeze wheezes within the environs,
a dying gasp from a certain bellows,
ripples curtains at the parlour windows.

Garden:

The bustling fauna’s infant joy assumes
gentle airs’ song amid the early blooms;
with the youthful sunlit scent of bluebells
among the budding green of baby fells.
An upright, strait, white-painted, wooden gate,
within a dry-stone wall of aggregate,
in situ, handsome gardener’s abbreviate
to the stony fastness, such hues placate.

Upon the wall ivy creepers crawl,
and Annual clumps, in green dormancy,
sit bank’d in foliaged cragged fall:
climbing roses waiting, in infancy,
to start that first crawl up and up the wall,
and join the rest in Nature’s growth tenancy.