New Year by Sue Hubbard

New Year

The year opens its legs
Alone I stand here
neither what I was
nor what I might become,
midwife and witness
to its re-birthing.

It does not nurture, this landscape
where winter light bends
to the curve of cloud and hillside.
The watery sun lacks conviction.

Now we enter the months of darkness,
the months of black silence,
skin flailed by wind,
cattle-prints pockmark the fields
with hoof-holes of ice.

Stiff blades of grass glisten
with rime under a vitreous moon
sheep clump like snow against
hedgerows brittles as bones.

Below the frozen mud albino roots
vulnerable, embryonic
secretly claw into metalled ground.

From a stook of dead reeds
a mallard starts, wing-tips
iridesce against the dark current
but the river flows on
silent, numb with cold
constant only to itself.

Poised between memory and desire
I receive the cold child.

(Published by Enitharmon 1994, Everything Begins with the Skin by Sue Hubbard)

Image by Eileen Cooper