FOOL’S GOLD
Threatened in the wild, razed for firewood, its bark
once the repository of prayers,
this Himalayan birch – planted to screen us
from our neighbour’s blind back bedroom windows
or vice versa – has, almost overnight
it seems, in a tardy autumn, turned
from pastoral green to gold, the gilt
of palaces and of temples, a wind-
shivered, aureate filigree, tear-shaped,
that burnishes the heart. When leaves have gone
bricks and pebble-dash where nothing happens
will appear obscurely as if through fingers
spread wide to mitigate the sunlight.
A sliver of bark like a leaf of paper
will catch in the bamboo beneath the tree.
Maybe this year or next we will inscribe,
with the finest brush, the Sanskrit prayer:
‘May we never quarrel!’.
Jeff Teasdale
February 2, 2026Another lovely poem David… reminding me that soon, the otherwise dead-looking trees alongside the M56 and the A55 will take on a ‘film’ of colour, invisible when you look straight at it (looking straight ahead at 70mph of course) but caught more in the corner of the eye, a glowing radiance within the bark .
And then, arriving in gale and storm-blasted Rhoscolyn, amongst the still deep ‘keep-your-heads-down’ hibernation there, a patch of bright red will jump out as we turn in, this my dogwood bush, the tops of which, above the parapet of the hedge, gone black with salt air. But deep in the shelter of long grass and ‘weeds’ – the plants which can survive this savage coastline climate – nestles this burning crimson to match the early sunset in The West above. There is no heat in it, but both light and colour, and which heralds yet another coming spring.
I cherish them all.