Next Years Firewood

Collected and felled and piled up to the sky

A tumbledown ruin, next year’s wood supply

It’s fly-sheeted canopy billows and falls

Wind whistling through ivy that clings to its walls

Next winter’s firewood, this summer’s hotel

Where industrious residents eat, toil and dwell

Efficient recyclers enabling decay

Both shelter and restaurant, its purpose today

Insects and beetles and solitary bees

Springtails and woodlice and black millipedes

Feeding on slugs that stay close to the ground

Whilst butterflies and ladybirds both hunker down

Wood-boring wasps build their sunny nest sites

Spider spins webs to catch roving woodlice

Snails feed on fungi and beetles eat pests

Allowing your garden to be at its best

A family of slow worms may hide underneath

Disguised on a blanket of old autumn leaf

Out back, in a crevice, a gnarly old toad

Patrolling a highway of hedgehogs and voles

The wrens come and forage for fat, tasty treats

When they see them, the newts make a hasty retreat

There’s rustling and bustling all day and all night

Yet the woodpile community stay out of sight  

It looks like a pile of old branches and twigs

Just waiting for autumn, to be chopped up and split

But maybe just leave it a year, two or three

I’m sure the inhabitants would nod and agree