Season of fructose gladness, its sugars mixed
With melancholy for declining life and year.
Now the year turns downwards to the compost tip

Rosella parrots with their sideways treadle-ing claws
Move transverse up the fire-thorn sprays,
Munch golden berries in a slow exultant dance.

But for students in the Acton antipodes the autumn is springtime,
When migrating flocks settle in to fresh campus groves
The newcomers mating and bonding, to raucous musical grunts
And thumps that threaten the ancient roof-ridges
Give their elders the fidgets
Et gaudeamus igit-
ur! In this Academe spring of new units with scarce an exam in sight,
Time when the teachers cut just a little slack,
As they unfold ancient wisdoms
For the briefly young in that old community
Whose anthem is juvenes dum sumus
And aims to chart our human humus.

Soon frosts will crispen till the last leaves crash
Tinkling on the frozen earth. But for me
June’s a white cockatoo, with pale crest of lemon,
perched in a poplar of burning gold
and the dawn mist wisping up like smoke.

Mark O’Connor