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Looking at the Leaves

I see the falling leaves – how on the air
Each slips and skids this way and that
In haphazard descent – dead things,
Being discarded: the use exhausted
They had for the good of the tree,
They drift in certain travel from presence
To the past – lost in the abandonment
Of the season, its function served –
And settle in dull anonymity, their colour,
Then fabric, draining into soil:
Carrying to earth too, as I understand
These things, toxins from the trees.
It is I who perceive, I who distinguish,
Any of this: they sense, comprehend,
Nothing of their character, qualities –
Their worth, benefit, to the whole
Of things in their flourishing and decay –
Nor fact nor meaning in fecundity
In one season, withdrawal in the next –
All this, in perception and expression,
Belongs to me – I watch and consider
Their utility, their necessity in life,
In small omniscience, and know
Nothing, nothing, of these for myself.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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