Winter is sparkling. Looms
Wake from the freezing North
The crying snow of lambs
Suffered and shaken forth.
Hard now in iron ground
Waters their song refuse,
Leaving the scattered sound
Of lambs that call their ewes.
A buried spring is born
In darkness, that makes full
Lambs from an ivory horn
Under the warmth of wool.
Crisp windows in their vice
Grip the white sheaves that show
The whispering ferns of ice
And crystal world of snow.
Nothing is now so still
As the white drifts that lic
Reaching the window-sill
To chill the newborn sky.
At Winter’s coming I
Test my perceptions, not
By changes in the sky
But by the secret root.
Until the waking bud
Forms on the sleeping tree,
By dictates of the blood
The dead admonish me.
I cannot separate,
So soundlessly they shine,
The windings of past fate,
Nor the lost lives from mine.
Yet nowhere in this waste
Voices from time endure.
No footprint here is traced,
No dying signature.
No rain, no curlew-cry
Calling across the field:
The locked lane under sky
Is blocked with snow and sealed.
Men will complain of Spring’s
Late coming, and those gifts
Checked by the weather, things
Lost in the gathered drifts.
The mask of Winter then
Shall not deceive them, known
To those rough-handed men
Like one who has with them grown.
And still the mask will stay.
Earth in their eyes will spread
A quilt as white as May
Quick with her newborn dead.
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