Looking for purple in a Glasgow suburb
Summer’s heather blaze has burned itself out.
Not that you’d know
from these paved streets laid straight
across dead fields.
Lamp-posts raise slender stems:
their rows of lavender-grey
painted to make you forget them.
Mauve-cheeked litter-bins
declare People Make Glasgow.
Ripped packaging
from a milk chocolate bar
tells its own story;
A Cadbury’s awning on the cornerstore
matches exactly.
There isn’t much that’s living colour.
Even this hydrangea
whose head of flowers stands out
from its rain-stunned
foliage has mostly gone to rust.
As for the rest
their summer show has brought
its curtain down.
Only a few stragglers who hadn’t seen
the lights dimming hang on.
At peak season the flowerscape
was hardly a draw.
On a dreich autumn day
it’s the ghost of the ghost of a ghost.
