top of page

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

bottom of page