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The shortest day. Men slumber heavily,
Rising belatedly from their own must;
The brief hours pass in twilit lethargy:
How bitter is the sharp air’s Hades taste.
The
flint church broods among its dead, their stones
Slewed
beneath burdensome ivy; wind wreathesThe graveyard, polishing to corpse-grey tones
The folded frosty grass and ice-thin leaves.
A
stark oak with its heart’s-vein branches bears
A
derelict nest like a wart; below,The densely-armoured holly, dour, outstares
The swart yew at whose trunk no plant will grow.
Among
the graves a barrel-chested robin
Chides
the rummaging blackbirds. At sundownMagpies in the frost-hung willow come mobbing –
Their clatter stilled by mist fading to fawn.
A
yelping bark: a watchful fox appears,
Scabby-brown
and thin. A house-fed tabbySneaks to safety. A man with cold-pinched ears
Considers the pocked stone of a tomb, webby
With
rotted bindweed. Ah, the dead will shiver
Tonight!
The sun, apricot-small, resilesBeneath roofs. Ice-film drifts in the river.
What fraught silence, what darkness; bead-hard frost fills
Hollows.
In such nullity, how will birth
Force
passage through the stiff, refusing earth?
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© December 2012