Damien Enright: The sun of October/Summery/On the hill's shoulder

Poet Dylan Thomas wrote eloquently about the month of his birth.

A holly laden with berries, and "brimming with..... blackbirds", as Dylan Thomas's 'Poem In October' says. But will the berries still be there at Christmas? Ah, there's the rub.

Blackbirds have eaten all the red berries on our cotoneaster — food for any birds that take a fancy.

I was going to write about isolation vis-a-vis the Sentinel Islands in the Indian Ocean, a location as isolated as any on earth, for various, other than purely geographical, reasons. I think I'll leave it for another day.

Just now, as I took a break and stepped out on the balcony deck of our house on a glorious October morning, a berry-eating blackbird took wing, a charm of goldfinches and a bevy of blue tits scattered from the peanut feeder, but, in the yard below, the half-wild heron stood, unruffled, by the pond, "the heron/ Priested shore" as the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, put it in Poem in October. The pond bank could hardly be described as a "shore", but the heron was "priestly", as are all herons, with their grey and black plumage, upright stance, and appearance of contemplation.

On the pond surface, one gorgeous water lily has broken the surface of the brown water, opened its petals, and displayed its opulence to be admired. My wife and I are the only available admirers: but the isolation is no penance here, alongside the wooded fields above the village.

On the lane up to our house, the 10,000 berries on the holly tree in the garden of our neighbour and friend, Beth Hanly, planted, no doubt by her late husband, Kevin — fisherman, wise man, banjo player, and poet — catch— the sun and, like the tree in the poem, was "brimming with whistling blackbirds [and] the sun of October/Summery/On the hill's shoulder".

There is no adjacent hill to be seen, as there was that morning, in Wales, when Thomas stepped forth into the waking world on his "thirtieth year to heaven", his 30th birthday. October is, also, by good fortune, the month of my own birthday. I'm glad, for a fine month it is, as fair as any in the springtime although, of course, it is the dying back, rather than the coming forth, of the year.

October is replete with sanguine colour, and with romance. One could quote poetic lines in praise of October endlessly — "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" and so on. It is a month in transition, a month that reminds us of time passing, a month to be cherished and extolled.

The path between the birches across the pond in our yard is carpeted with dead leaves, some brown, some variegated, some as red as blood — in the poem, Thomas says, "the town below lay leaved with October blood...".

Beyond the trees, on the west Cork field edges, fuchsia still blooms alongside golden gorse.

Whitethorn bushes are laden with haws, bright as the holly berries in the sunlight. Deep in the sceacs, black sloes grow fat, unseen; crab apples on the wild trees redden; wild damsons can be this year a feast, next year a famine.

Figs ripen on a tree opposite Timoleague Abbey but few survive to become the sweet, wild figs of the Mediterranean. All are winter food for the birds, and, one hopes, will be still there when the redwing thrushes and the fieldfares seek shelter in Ireland from the Nordic winter.

The black and yellow grapes on our outdoor arbour, roofed but otherwise open to the elements, hang in heavy bunches, selfishly denied to the blackbirds by a protective net. Planted as cuttings just three years ago by a brother-in-law who grows the finest grapes in Montenotte, in Cork city, they have produced a crop that had him, open-mouthed, marvelling at them, more fecund as they are, in this, their second year's fruiting, than his Montenotte crop — albeit his is enough to make two dozen bottles of wine, while our small 'vineyard', wouldn't furnish half a dozen, so we eat the crop.

Poor Dylan Thomas smoked too much, drank too much, and contracted pneumonia in New York while staying at the famous Chelsea Hotel. Poet and playwright of rare promise, his death was a testament to the timeworn adage, "Those whom the Gods love, die young".

To insert myself humbly into this story, when he was in London, Dylan drank in The Fitzroy Tavern, aka The Hundred Marks, around the corner from where I lived, 20 years later, in Tottenham Court Road. I'd have loved to have met him, and hear his melodious Welsh voice in person, but my timing was out. Anyway, I  wouldn't have dared approach him.

We had nothing in common except an October birthday — but certain lines he wrote, I will never forget, stanzas driven by his passion, poems that honour all things that are natural and freestanding in the open air.