simonhlilly

In Winter Hills

A shallow
cold stream
of inconvenient air
Is winter in the shaped and cocksure city.
It fills only the void between buildings
And the thin, guttering bones of the homeless.
But a raw six months is winter
In the hills of the northern world.
It builds itself a dance of long-knived layers,
Sucking heat through the ice-spangled drills of starlight,
Peels back and back the year’s green thrust,
Draws out a most echoing hollow certainty
That just one wrong turn, one unlucky day
And this thin, frayed thread shall splay,
Split red and run itself to mud, to ice,
To empty earth, to earth a carcass chord,
A final cold bed,
concluded iron,
sighed
silent
mulch.

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