Day Four: A Poem

Walking in Snow

You walk, you fall,
you walk, you fall,
stumbling across the field like a Magus
wringing his ungloved hands.

You are outside at last and the world
suggests itself to you in a grey cloud
that hangs over the long hill to the east,
or west – you can’t tell which --
and makes you shiver into life.

The clouds shake out their pretty confection
of snow, each clump bouncing in the wind
before your face, each singing its misshapen jingle,
each flake barbed to another,
and then another, and then again more.
The silence, too, sings to you.

The snow doesn’t care who you are,
though you love it, and
though the cold would kill you,
you bless the moment
into which you have awoken,
which is this moment.

Turning back towards the house, you hear
a chiming coming from the trees
and turn your whole body to face
the one note that is this Now,
when you should be inside, but
are outside, cold and yet so
hot with life the fire burns a hole
through your borrowed coat,
burns away the world:
everything.