Sunday Morning

Another early draft of a poem . . . not a description of this morning exactly (for one thing, I did go to church!), but certainly inspired in part by today's snowy conditions:

Today the world outside is hard and cold,

a scene in black and white, as in the olden days.

Icicles spear down from the guttered roofs behind us, while

starlings re exchanging words in a language half-remembered from my childhood

from the skeletal top branches of the ash trees

that claw thinly up to meet the grey sky.

Often the sky as I see it from our hill seems to soar away,

it is open and blue, as high as the planets and stars;  but today

my gateway to the heavens has become instead a cold steel lid

to close in our little world.  Under its greyness the colours leach away

and our monochrome garden is as still as a photograph:

only a restless wind in the bushes beyond our fence

and the distant starlings exchanging branches

add any motion to this wintry scene.

It is Sunday morning, and across the valley below the town itself is still and quiet.

Its good folk will be mostly

tucked in bed I think, though perhaps a hardy few

might have ventured out to church.  I have not gone with them,

being not in the mood for candles and hassocks and prayers.

I turn away, look back, and the ash tree, suddenly, is empty,

its chatty starlings having found something else to do,

and gone away to do it.

The wind picks up a notch

and snow begins to flurry against my windows.

We are a distance into the New Year, but

any thoughts of spring, for now, remain securely locked away,

held back behind that flat grey sky.  I see a crow arrive

to march importantly along the pitch of the roof behind us,

while I, newly-made hot chocolate in hand, decide

I may just as well go back to bed for a bit.

And maybe - if the chocolate holds out - I might stay there

until the sky is open for business again

and the colours have returned.