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Dawn like creation’s moment: fireball orange
Engulfs the sky, inflaming the flat cloud
And searing pink the townscape below; lozenged
Glass flares and freezes, intincted with blood.
Shorn
of growth’s clutter, a wisteria prinks
Its
picked bones; the tall poplar swayinglyDisdains the bundled shoppers whom cold cranks
Into shop door stand-offs, shrill and unseemly.
And
then the snow. From a steel sky it flogs
Faces
and legs, creaks underfoot and lardsThe common. Gulls, edgy at snow-mad dogs,
Settle, beaten down by its stinging shards.
The
iron-bound lake is frozen. White-nosed coot
Ballet-strut
its grey slabs, planting arrow-printsIn slush. Snow waves, chivvied by the wind’s shout,
Lap the ice, where thrown sticks protrude, black as flints.
Determined,
children build snowmen, cupping
The
featherdown to ice, though perished fingersProduce screams at sunset. The air, dipping
To dark, is mauve with snow. A coot cry lingers.
Despite
all, the yellow jasmine has flowered,
Its
petals soggy as tissue. Bulbs erectTheir spatulas. The fragile snowdrop, bowered
In ice, droops its molars. Shabby man, shipwrecked
In
darkness, racked by bronchitis or worse,
Janus-like
twists in the turn of the year’s course.
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©
January 2013