circling chill

Dancing naked in the snow, the crisping icy bites! So good to be alive - we can fight back the circling chill here if we just stand our ground.

Look to the trees in the distance and wolves pad softly in the flickering lace-curtained light. Treading down the furrows.

a gift

Past pale dawned stocking laughter, the family gathers once more on our bed.  Oranges and apples and chocolate-coins tumble and a little baby looks up in adoration at our milky-breasted eldest.  He twists.

A Villa tooth-brush and matching rosy-apple sweets fall into the hands of our son.  He is happy.

The present spinning, and by turns we venture through Christmas together, gathered at the foot of our bed.

it's my party ...

so, this is christmas ...

The radio plays on my journey through rime-frosted trees.  A heart beats in time to the wolverine heat, and do we believe in Father Christmas? I wonder.

So here it comes, tumbling down in orange-peeled, candle-wax .. the crib filled and donkeys lowing.  I watch the flickering lights fill a Methodist chapel and rise on the sweep of a carolled wave.  Skewered fruit and a sash of crimson-licked blood to gird this world. And we wonder.

He is here with us.  Smiling and alive.  Could it really be any other, this Christmas day?  There are no parcels to unwrap, for He is all.

The flight in mist to another place.  Fire consuming the Norfolk balm, where a flotsam heart hangs still and bloodless from the wall. Are these faces I see in the bleached driftwood of a wind-whip walk the length of the sands?

So, this is Christmas ...

flagging

isn't it swell ....

Past cracking flags and the grey swell of a Thames morning.  We venture up some stairs in search.  Yet everyone has gone ... there is nothing here but breaking waves and the flap of coloured cloth.  We sit quietly at the back and watch the ghosts weave.  Is it they who have become grey, or we?

Remembering endless journeys on a swaying train.  Once I was young and scared and bold.  Stepping out upon the adventure and the grind and the smoke and the endless, endless howling of empty legal words.

Masked rooms and dancing processions.  Words dancing.  Scratching 'cash from chaos' on the back of a strange buttered swan in yet another anonymous City hotel.  Making fortune cookies from a pile of paper.

And a beautiful, grey-eyed lone wolf pads softly from one side of the screen to the other.

The world becalmed.  Past cracking flags and the grey swell of a Thames morning.

clearing in the mist ....