October was conker month;
we always waited a little too late—
perhaps out of misplaced optimism
that winter was further than we thought—
so that we had to search amongst the
curls of dead leaves, seeking stragglers,
squirrel-chewed and mucky.
It was a very typical sort of ritual:
all cycles of mother and daughter,
of seasons, and of soil
(for it all comes down to soil, in the end),
and, perhaps most importantly,
done only because it was
what we had always done.
And so we would scurry,
zigzagging, hide-and-seeking
between the chestnut trees,
hunting for the spiny men
who squatted, brittle and embittered,
like stunted sea urchins
in amongst the leaf litter,
until, there, there, cowering
between the roots:
a sharp green blunted by age.
We put our weight on it,
rolled it, heel to toe,
until it split open,
a laughing, gaping mouth.
Now the gem itself
was plucked, primed,
polished, inspected,
the contour map of swirling browns admired—
before being tossed abruptly
into a waiting plastic bag,
already heavy with doomed seeds.
At home, they rested next to china birds
on mantelpieces, desks, shelves,
tarnishing and growing wrinkles,
quite worthless in the sterile air,
and filling valuable space;
we kept them,
all the same.
Author notes
Not sure about all of the punctuation, and I know the ending is rather abrupt... Do you prefer it as it is, or with a dash instead of a semi-colon and with "but" at the beginning of the penultimate line? Or with the last two lines as one line, possibly with a blank line beforehand? Or can you come up with something altogether more cunning? And should the title possibly be 'What We Did with Conkers'?
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We always wondered what we should do with all the conkers we collected. Obviously they could be used to play conkers with, but that always seemed a bit hazardous, and you'd have to have a serious game to get rid of the number of conkers we insisted on gathering... We considered varnishing them and making them into little animals with googly eyes, or rather wobbly dollhouse furniture. More abstract ideas included using them as fuel or currency. We did throw them at squirrels coming to steal nuts from the bird feeder and cats coming to eat birds/relieve themselves in our garden at one point, but in the end opted for pinecones as they make more noise and are less damaging if they actually hit the creature in question. What do you do with conkers? (I assume we aren't the only people who collect them...?)
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