The Lingering Gale
Hampstead Heath — October 1987
The morning woke in fractured light,
A sudden, breathless, altered space.
The wild crescendo of the night
Had left the world a stranger's place.
We walked the tracks of Hampstead Heath,
Where ancient giants strewed the ground,
With tangled canopies beneath,
And roots exposed without a sound.
The great green lungs of London torn,
An empire felled in shades of grey,
Yet in the wreckage of that morn,
We stepped into the quiet day.
Shoulder to shoulder, stepping high
O'er splintered wood and broken oak,
We saw the fallen giants lie,
And shared the wonder that they woke.
Nearly forty years have come and gone,
Yet something of that day remains.
It stirred the trees outside my window,
And brought that morning back again.
The Garden — October 2026
My garden today is quiet and wet,
the sun cutting raw through white and heavy grey clouds.
Look at the mess it left behind:
empty pots rolling lazily across the grass,
the shattered, broken canes of the clematis,
and the plastic lid of the composter
thrown clean into the next-door neighbour's yard.
A single rosebud, bent but fair,
holds tight a bead of heavy rain.
Across the lawn lie broken twigs
and leaves the wind has scattered.
Down low, the poplar branches barely stirred,
but high above, their crowns were still swaying,
sweeping through great arcs of one or two metres
in the lingering wind.
Even the birdbath can't settle down,
its water still rippling and trembling in the light.
I stood a while and watched them,
remembering another morning,
another landscape changed by wind,
and the joy of walking through it together.
And somewhere in the lingering wind,
that morning lived again.
Mich & Eva
© 2026 Mich. All rights reserved.
Published under the literary identity Whispers of the Heart. Created through human–AI collaboration.