Spectator Competition: Lines on the leaves

In Competition 3374 you were invited to write an ode to autumn. There was bathos amid the beauty. I regret not finding room for Alan Millard’s ‘Season of musts’, Elizabeth Kay’s garden musings, Joseph Houlihan’s paean to the blazing hills, Nicholas Lee on what Keats could do with ‘rotting vapes arranged about the scene’, and this from Anca Gramaticu: ‘a flock of leaves took their flight/ In a roar of applause’. Finally, there’s just space for Daniel Galef’s poem in full: ‘The first leaf that falls –/ That takes balls.’ Those below win £25.

Supposing autumn to be a country doctor
In his vintage russet car and wholemeal tweeds,
Prescribing to both plutocrat and pauper.

Splendid reassurance at his brusque arrival,
Attention burnishes his patients and their needs,
Life ripening where there’s doubt of survival.

His voice is fruity, his bedside manner easy
A first frost’s clarity he brings to signs he reads:
His diagnoses, Latin gilded, he keeps breezy.