“Four seasons in one day”
sang Crowded House and
as you draw nearer to the Equator
all the seasons happen
in every day’s cycle
In Tennerife, north side
of the island
you wake to blue skies
and yet already a wisp
of cloud pours over the lip
of Mount Teide like
the tentative sign of
an eruption by this
still hot to the touch
at the top, relatively
sleeping giant, but
as the morning wears on
the cloud finds it’s level
and spreads less threateningly
over the pine forests
below the crater edge
shrouding them in fog
on out over the banana
plantations that surround
Puerto de la Cruz
then on over the city itself
where, just after lunch
they deliver their own
micro-seasonal rain
hardly worth the
unfurling of an umbrella
but nurturing the bananas
as reliable as clockwork
except when the occasional
Atlantic storm disrupts
the proceedings
and having delivered their
promise, the clouds dissolve
and the season of
sunny evening takes their place…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, kim881 in Poetics, invites us to write about “micro-seasons” after the Japanese custom of dividing their year not just into four seasons but into seventy-two “micro-seasons” such as ‘frogs start singing’ and ‘crickets chirp around the door’…