A night of light snow, followed by clear-sky freezing has left
The ground hard and white.
Rapidly the sun, heroic, overcoming all, climbing high,
Melts snow to iridescence at every margin, every edge.

On a single hill, snow is held in thrall. Like a crumpled Mount Fuji, but
No blossom, no art,
The hill holds its ghost-clothes, despite the sun’s triumphal progress.
Magisterial old beeches sun themselves among old walls and
Moss-covered stones, dripping, wet, full of temptation.

Birds call, fluting, piping, chameleon-coloured, slipping away like lizards.

I’ve never understood the detritus of forestry. The wind cuts and dives
In and out of the shambles of stumps and trenches, where startled pines left behind
Look half-naked and vulnerable, hesitantly beginning to stretch arms to the sky,
To each other, united in the icy wind.

I follow the wind. I leave the wreckage, the small shelter
Of self-seeded spruce erupting from glossy gorse and broom. Ahead
A vast and dreary vista of huge, brown and empty fields,
Unpunctuated by tree or hedge-bank, meticulously ploughed and harrowed.
The dust rises, faintly reeking still of the abattoir, that small, derisory recompense
For decades of soil inevitably lost and life precluded.

Back by road, the first wood anemones
In the deep and shady gulf where children once played canyons,
And a rising stir of sound comes up from behind. Suddenly
A thousand geese are shifting and snaking in the blue, blue sky,
Withering the last frost with their joy.