Lain Here for Mercy

Accumulating like memory,
Drifted snow by the hedgebank
A filtering smirr of ice in the air
Whose wide spiral to ground
Makes trackless white
Flat to the woodland edge.

In shelter, under the trees canopy
Snowfall will not enter the dimness;
Silence closes in.
Only a few flakes drop now,
Lazy in the glim light.

Birches’ white stems, stark pillars in the shade,
Hold up the roof of darkness
Over the brown leaves’ carpet, still brown.
Winter flecks lie cold upon it.

Wind still moves the high branches.
But nothing reaches the scuttling shadows.
The rustling escape of creatures
Hiding deeper in lair or nest
Whispers the mysteries of stifled weather;
Everything at rest.

I alone walk upright on the trails
Or step forward to the future, finding.
If I knew the secrets of the wood
And understood its unwritten language
If I were conversant with it

Or if I could fix a fox eye to eye
Convince a wood-mouse of my intent
To walk in this twilit place
And leave no trace,
What would I be?

I would have become a ghost of the trees
As much a phantom as the snow
At least in its falling.
I would be the shapeless sweep
Of exhausted blizzard,
An empty cloud, a blown-out gale.

Deeper in the forest where there are no tracks,
Neither rutted road nor footprint
My own footsteps make imprints only
For the ground to spring again
And forget my passing.

So deep now, the stones rise up
Swollen from the deepest earth.
They alone remember times
When step and structure came before
The forest’s growing,
When others walked here in light
Made circled shelters roofed with sod
And slept in them, slept,
Eventually forever.

Here in the heart-glade of the forest
They laid down under leaf and stem.
Time drifted over and the forest grew
Until, like the stones themselves,
Every trace was buried by the weight of years.
Erased like every feature under drifting snow

This place is sullen with the burden of it
Dark as the graves still gripped among the roots.
The darkness persisting is colder than the snow
Each twisting branch holds back
Colder than the moon above
Colder than breathless stillness.

I am the ghost of winter frost
The chill hand of time
And eroded remembering.

I am the ghost of those forgotten
Fading in spaces among the stones
Glistening on surfaces, thin ice,
A pale precipitate of air

This is the secret of the wood
In discontented winter
Its few unuttered words.
Its speechlessness.

The small mammals run from me
From what I was and what I am
From the ice I have carried
From my feeble dust.

Like the crystals of falling snow
I have lain myself here
For mercy
In the twilit place
Walked
And left no trace.

 © BH 2015

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Winter. Keeps me on my toes. Long walks to get anywhere through drifts and heavy snowfall. I had a moment, peering out a canteen window at the snow coming down, with a mediocre grove of tree plantation across the whitening green. Put me in mind of deeper, more natural woodland in winter where old secrets still lie.

However old, I thought, our footsteps have walked with nature (or on nature, as they do now). Well, that thought crystallised, a bit like snowfall. At first there were words, then they assembled themselves into a kind of order. Then, meaning. I can't really take much credit…