Deep Winter
The woods are winter still.
The whole place gripped cold
And wrapped in a day long dusk,
The sky labouring beneath its own weight.
Last night’s hoar has persisted:
Bramble leaves fringed delicately white
And spent bracken fronds
Frosted and curled with cold.
But away through the damp-glistened hornbeam,
The rusted ash and incongruous holly
The gloom is centring itself
Around a robin’s beak.
The first notes restrained,
As if testing the air and drawing breath.
Afterwards exhaled in a languid flurry
Of smoothness and viscosity.
It seems the summer could hardly
Be further from this place.
Forgotten by a wandering sun,
Shrunken and stifled by winter’s creep.
It has been absorbed into its atoms,
Remembered by its vestiges:
The bird with the spring
On the tip of its tongue.
(© Ross Gardner 2018)
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