The Journey Home in January

Another first draft, some words written today:

Skeletons in silver grey, winter trees

that stand ghostly still against the snow-lit evening sky.

Mist shrouds their lower branches, as though the fields of snow

are rising up to take to the frosting air.

My vision is of a world without life;  it is as if

everything has forgotten how to breathe, as if

every pulse has slowed down to stop.

So there is only you, and me, in our metal box,

and the distant lights of another car ahead.

Nothing else is moving,

nothing else seems to have any substance.

We are surrounded by ghosts,

by the muslin rags and tatters of some ancient time, by the dead and gone.

We are the only survivors.

The red lights in front disappear from

this narrow ribbon of black snaking between vast snowfields,

with we now the only living souls upon it.

In fact I take this road nearly every day;  I drove it all summer - it is

part of the familiar currency of my life.  Yet tonight

I no longer know it, there is nothing here I recognise.

We are travelling across a different planet, betrayed and abandoned, left

to wonder if we will ever make it home.