Winter Trails

Winter Starts in Spring Sun

'Midwinter spring is its own season'

From the dawning sprung
the sun today while I lazed
its sweetest hours,
a blue with high hazed
fair-weather, rag-rolled clouds.

A brass band plays
Morrisson's lobby, mellow timbre:
'All things bright and beautiful.'
People too warm in winter coats,
smile and mill and smile again
in slow dance of laden aisles.

'Slam in the lamb' and we head
for the hills while it does.

Driving into unbearable brightness
as if the golden dazzle would consume
alveoli kindling of stark trees
and then transmute us all in its alchemic rage,
the whole world its crucible.

Ah, I learn I 'grieve it on its way'
as shadows leap, and even empty
hedgerows bring some flickering relief.

Chiaroscuro, silhouette, sun-pool, shadow
as the road snakes and villages drift by
from blue horizon and back to it.

There a rusted tree retains
curled and cracking leaves;
a hill crest loses us in fire;
evergreens are sombre sentinels;
a broad-winged buzzard stalls above a copse -
everything sharp, so clean
as high a resolution as summer ever was.

On Raw Head hill the wind's on edge,
and resonates a roaring dialogue
with trees. Winter high halls blow through us
but the holly and the ivy
guard our green cave chapel.

Within the deep dark chancel, the far light
falls weakly on this sandstone wall.
It is so still white noise cascades.

Emerging in an infancy, we stand
in mediation by the wooded slope,
which drops down to the fields below.
We're lost in light,
fine-netted in the birches, roseate.

Climb back to the serrated wind,
razor flailed, dragon tongued -
we leave it on the hill behind.

'Now goeth sonne under woode;
me rewes, Marie, thy fair roode.' -

but back down on the plain I have it
rear-view mirror now and again -
bright ball barred with dark cloud
in a sky slating over from the west.

Later, I come out with a colander of King Edwards
into a deep blue... The feast is good.

................... ...