Wind

My tower shudders
floor quivers
doors rattle in alarm
at the gusts: precocious
spoilt winds adopt
a warring guise: blast
all things living
all things made 
violence and rage 
fisted force of blows
unseen and unpraised
hit my windows.

My doors 
clatter at their keepers
as if driven to distraction
by static helplessness:
prisoners shaking bars.

My feet absorb the stress -
the building's tensile skin taking
every shudder in - 
my body quivering
with each shake of floor and stone.

The trees all swiftly bow and scrape
rub their sticks in anguish
drop their offerings and hope
appease windgod by heaps 
of leaves, peer up amid the toss
at a sky worn thin to grey 
by elemental interplay
the laugh of dervishes.

My stones can listen, fret,
yet uphold their press: each block
fits hard shoulders
to the other: withstand shock
but it sways, blindly, tower
of mortar and of stone
petrified:

my floorboards know
that time and wind together
down
the sturdiness of wood and stone
in elemental time 
this tower will become
a refuge for small animals
a pile of mossgrown humps
dreaming of the
high proud keep
they once had formed.

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