a week or so before the year pivots

     & December closes, like a coffin lid,

over the unnourished land;

     & hush now, here come

the bootless, the shoeless, the buttonless,

     curling their bony blue toes

over ice, spread like a punched-in

     windscreen over the wide fields;

beyond the treeline is the Border,

     gorgeous where the plumdark sky

sinks below the earth’s ooze;

     there is nothing here

you will recognise, not even this silver birch

     hanging like a smashed limb;

here’s a rusting bike wheel, the torn canopy

     of a fragile and long-ago plane –

others have tried this –

     mud on their soles, their eyelids,

arms outstretched as if a loved one

     were waiting, casting a short, cold

shadow across the shifting Border;

     the moon rises, a brief howl of light,

before clouds trawl a darkness deeper

     than the childhood wells we drank from.

Sue Burge