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(Reproduced with permission - this poem may not be reproduced without permission from David Higham Associates.)

"Now I Joseph was walking, and I walked not."
                                          (Book of James or Protevangelium)

Now I Joseph was walking, and I walked not,
Between the allotments on a December morning.
The clouds were mauve as a crocus, peeling back petals,
And a sparse pollen of snow' came parping down
On the bare ground and on green-house groins and dun
Tight-head chrysanthemums crumpled by the frost,
The cock in the hen-run blustered to its perch
On the lid of the swill bucket, rattled its red
At the fluttering flakes, levered its throat open—
And not a croak creaked out.
                                                  I looked about me :-
The snow was stock-still in the sky like pluckings
Of cottonwool glued on a grocer's window,
And down in the brown of the dyke, a smoky feather
Let on a robin's head, between the black
Glass-ally eyes and the gimlet beak,
And never a flick it gave to shake it off,
Workmen on the electric cable track
Swung picks in the air and held them there, rigid,
Raised bait to mouths and never took a bite.
One, putting up a hand to scratch his head,
Shifted the peak of his cap a couple of inch,
And never scratched. A dead leaf drifting
Hung bracketted against the wire netting
Like a pin caught on a magnet.
                                                 For at that minute
Making was made, history rolled
Backward and forward into time, memory was unfolded
Like a quick discovery, old habits were invented,
Old phrases coined. The tree grew down
Into its sapling self, the sapling into the seed.
Cobbles of wall and slate of rafters
Were cleft and stratified again as rock,
And the rock un-weathered itself a cloud-height higher,
And the sea flowed over it. A brand-new now
Stretched on either hand to then and someday,
Might have and perhaps.
                                              Then suddenly the cock
Coughed up its crow, the robin skittered off,
And the snow fell like a million pound of shillings.
And out in the beginning always of the world
I heard the cry of a child.