Last Snows of Spring

In the sky, the wind is like an arrow,
Clouds cross it like fog shredding
And the blue, cracked and hard, cold,
Like the surface of ice when sun shines.

And the last snows of spring come
In squalls to veil the hills’ steepness
To turn the contours briefly grey.

The sun between too-hurried showers
Blinks back winter’s sleep, blinks again
With the slow melting snow-melt running
Drop by drop to heather roots among the stones
At the grass-marsh edge.

So sky,
Captured in particles of crystal rain,
Ice-grains in the updraft,
Coalescing and rising
In the anvil of a thunderhead,
Goes to ground.

If Lucifer fell once more as a frozen angel,
Fire quenched and brutalized by the air itself;
If he lay spread out against the sky above him
So attenuated, so cold a devil, that the sun,
Faint and infrequent, could barely touch his heart;
It would be no different from the captive sky falling,
No different from late and laborious snow.

© BH, 2017

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We had some. Snow that is. And I thought of the title above. Took it from there. I wrote it as a very late sleet-squall came over and blotted the hillside. I remembered the image here I took somewhere near Dalwhinnie a few days past.

Then Lucifer came tumbling. No idea how he got in on the act.