December 28th
The world seems to be asleep,
Resting beneath its late December fog.
No creatures stir on the moors;
there is no life in the air,
Which rather sits and mopes in grey
clumps around the haggard trees
It is as if it is heeding the resetting of the calendars,
Swallowing itself into patient gestation,
Returned to that nothing something out of which it seeped itself,
That forever moment not so really long ago
The sheep still chew,
The dull ambassadors of stolidity
In a world that knows only change but,
For this pause,
The land and life is theirs
As it rests exhausted on its haunches,
The sterterous post-festive breathing subsiding
Into a quiet wheeze,
Which whistles softly on the icy mist above the grass
It waits to lurch up and stagger on again,
The gnarled and many-notched trunk of time,
Which bears the weight of everything upon itself
And would collapse if there were anywhere to fall.
Still, the sheep chew, staring at the firmness of the ground
The lights of the town grow as we are drawn into it,
And these thoughts begin to dim and slip,
For the city knows no rest and does not speak to nature.
So I must make do with the rest I glimpsed,
Bottle the memory to sip from
When the caffeine email afterglow sputters anxiously into my downtime,
And remember that the light to guide me home is not this radiation
But the late December moon