Signs of Autumn

It seems no time since I was tagging Instagram posts with "signs of summer" and here I am onto autumn with this rowan tree covered in berries, one of many such trees I noticed in the early evening sunlight in Benmore Gardens today. After our busy week, we allowed ourselves some leeway today (once we'd been to church - makes us sound frightfully virtuous, but there you are) and thereby missed the torrential showers that had enlivened the morning. In fact we had a glorious walk, at the end of which we saw the little red squirrel with the almost black tail, and I saw a woodpecker at really close quarters on a feeding station. He flew off before I even thought of getting my camera out.

As a footnote, here's an interesting poem by my hero R.S.Thomas. It struck me today because of the effect when our rector arrived at the end of his prepared sermon and continued preaching. Not that our church is at all ugly, nor vanishing into the grass, but it was interesting ...

A little aside from the main road, 
becalmed in a last-century greyness,
there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal 
to the tourist to stop his car
and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river goes by, and quick shadows 
of clouds, too, and the chapel settles
a little deeper into the grass.


But here once on an evening like this, 
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire 
and burned steadily before them 
with a strange light, so that they saw 
the splendour of the barren mountains 
about them and sang their amens 
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.