Winter

The skeletal wood, memory and blueprint

Anchored in the long-still motionless murk

Of sombreing ivy, knackered bracken

The starling's one mourning whistle

Punctuates this chill listening void

Arrayed with the rustling corpses

Of remembered leaf fall

Winter's sulking mantle drains the dying light

Emerging to what remains

The heart falls short of cheer

I climb the embittered brittle ground

Remembering warmth, reviewing behind:

Yes -- the wood, hulking dark and near

And beyond, the field, 

Utterly, utterly still

Defeated to flat colourless anonymity

Life in hiding

Beyond beyond, misted in irrelevance

More land, more frost-flayed drear

Further places, fainter planes of ceding light

On, away into distance

The dusking zones of winter's charcoal hegemony