A Winter Walk

The first draft of a poem started today, but which reflects on a walk taken two winters ago, in harder weather:

I find the water no longer flowing

by the old lock, and along the frozen canal

I have traced and followed the footprints of swans

all along the crumbled and frosted snow.

On this hardest of mornings, I look across to see the

grey sheep huddled and sullen where the fodder beet was dropped

just below the brake at the top of the field, and

the few black birds that furl and flap around them.

The sky is as grey as steel,

and as empty as my heart.  I walk on above the lock,

past where a fence has tumbled

under its weight of snow, and into the field,

setting myself to climb under the black trees.  The sheep

do not move as I pass them, crossing a broken stile

to reach the old bridge. The stream here still tumbles thinly down bank,

sheathed though now within a dark culvert of ice.

There are some colours for me to see:

here where the sheep have left a yellow stain in the snow,

there where the brick of the bridge presents an orange red, while

ahead of me a grove of holly stands dark green, and ivy

clambers against the oaks and alders along the stream.  Yet in my eyes

all the colours are merely shades of grey; there is

nothing that shines in them.  Today there is more light from the snow

than from the sky.

As I top the rise and walk across to the stile, I watch

a single heron make its ponderous flight across the black pines,

twisting briefly to evade a couple of crows.  Its harsh cry

seems to echo the length of the field,

where the sheep had stood in silence while I passed between them.

I make the road and turn for home,

skidding briefly on the compacted snow and knowing,

as I swing my arms and clap my mittened hands, that

I too am infected by greyness, drained of light and colour, that

this winter is as much within me as around.