IMBOLC 2019

Snowdrop melts into glass-crisp swirl.
Spring stutters
Under silver tresses
Of birch. Leant
Against the flaking bark,
Chilblain wrinkled,
Old one stoops
Arthritic with her
Dowager's hump,
Cradling the bridal bursting
In her lap,
Where the edge of thaw
Stains daylight
With its fluttering storms
Of crocus and inclemency.

She lifts her aged fingers
To the tent's sagged roof
To shed the snowfall
While she croons
Songs of weasel and of hare.
Earth's scald of inner friction
Too far beneath to warm
This refugee, this home-lost.
From temporary kitchens,
Soup pans
Nourish with blessings
Ladled into her bowl,
Whose simmering surface
Reflects the face of an angel.

In her arms, the youthful shoot
Still sheathed in silence,
Stirs and hears the lapwing
Curling and kiting
Through the wheeling wafers
Of persisting winter.

THE WINTER OF '63

The winter of '63 was the first winter I really remember as a toddler, growing up in the Dearne Valley, Yorkshire in the north of England.

I thought they would all be like this - the coldest winter of the 20th century. 

I remember the snow banked up the side of our house as high as the top of the downstairs windows; the snow falling in through the back door when my dad came home from work at the station, the frozen rails and the steam from the trains in the icy air; the adventures of making snowmen, snow dogs, snow lambs, snow horses, snow igloos, snow angels; the icicles hanging from the back of the coal-house, the outside loo freezing up and the chill of the tin bath we had hanging from a nail in the back yard; the ice inside the bedroom windowpanes, with no central heating but a smelly paraffin heater upstairs; the cloak of silence over the valley as it muffled the pit hooters, the crunch of feet through the village, the bleak singing of the birds in the frozen hedgerows. 

The excitement and anticipation and sheer wonder at this world of whiteness was overwhelming, untainted by dread and disappointment, with slush and slippy rinks of treacherous thaw an unknown thing for the future. 

FIRST SNOW AND THE OWL

This poem I wrote while I was at Leicester University studying for a BA in English Literature.

One of my lecturers was poet Robert Wells who was on the editorial board of the English Faculty's 'Poetry Worksheet'. The Spring 1982 edition carried this poem of mine which Robert Wells had seen and recommended for publication. 

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FIRST SNOW AND THE OWL

Sun's haemorrhage

On snow's anaemia momentarily

Lights up the owl's alarm.

Pink freezes blue in the forgetfulness

Of moments while the owl

Calculates winter's coming.

Above, numb limbs of tree

Girdle him in stupor,

Sore, separate suddenly from his hooting.

Conspicuous as blood on snow

He breathes steadily beneath measured

Feathers.

He will not hoot again,

Or call to the vast, heedless settling

Delicacy. The nest is cold.

This he knows, eyeing the white shock

Of the hibernal onset, mistrustful,

Weighing a branch beneath his weight.

Below him, slow, the roots leak paths

In the void, rising, stern, determined

Like the grip of bruised fingers.

The owl flies low, buoyed up by fear

And the air's crisp parsimony,

To warn the sun.

Raindrops scatter into shimmer

Raindrops scatter into shimmer

Mint diamonds out of sunblaze

Dream of growing up as snowflakes

Giggling into the mirror