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1. Before
Covent Garden at dusk,
still stuffed with Christmas shoppers
driven by the contradictions of their lists.
Beside the towering, tinselled tree
three Chinese buskers, improbable
in square spectacles and suits,
splash yearning notes
up off the black cobbles
into a moon-lit lake of sky.
And as the ripples die away,
the dark-needled tree itself begins to sing;
light throated starlings deep in the branches
declare themselves like chiming candles.
2.
Years ago, the candles
set our Christmas tree ablaze.
Father, home from the War,
threw my brother’s brand new jacket
round the flames, hurled
the smoking bundle like a slung comet
out through the window.
The brittle cold of other Christmas nights
was lit by stars like great magnolia
snagged high in the silent elms
against whose rough bark
you first announced the hot smoothness
of your lips. Of lips.
And there was still the softer flame
of treble voices
singing of a child,
and all the perpetual possibilities
of a child.
The holy days of Christmas
straining like Mary
towards an understanding.
3.
For half the world
these are the shortest days.
Far out, beyond all suburbs,
at the untidy margins of frozen fields,
old angels with tawdry wings
heap up the ambiguous present
at the feet of other trees. Bare winter trunks
whisper in charcoal down a white page;
the rustle of tiny crystals -
ice falling out of a great sky.
Freezing fog has bandaged light.
The mid-morning sun looms up
like an immense headlamp.
Hoar frost; the seasons’ litter
beaded in crystal. It glitters briefly,
crunches underfoot, and is submerged
as light moves off, and dark
flows in behind.
4.
This Christmas is my fathers ninety-first.
In the house at the edge of the village,
his windowsills are littered
with the bejewelled husks
of last summer’s tortoiseshells.
By day, the low winter sun
taps weakly on the dusty window panes.
By night, he drifts alone
down dark canals.
5.
The ditch between church and river
brims limpid with the winters earlier rains;
and somewhere in my head a salmon, pink juiced,
is swimming towards our silver-candled feast.
I clasp it, glitter wrapped -
and put down a corpse. Oh
child oh child oh child -
swaddled in slack skin, sag-eyed, and
led like all the innocents
to be parcelled tight in hessian,
a bundle for a charnel pit
too packed, too parched for any tear
to stay the butterflies
long since brushed past the eye socket
to escape the skull.
6.
Outside, dark hedgerows wait
to crucify the dying light.
Only the bottle green holly,
bloodpricked, ignites the slack season,
still and null; the last colour
drained with the drifted leaves.
No light to warm soft flesh,
to candle youth. No saving wing. Only
the necessary wound of dark.
And as the whole earth
slows, it is a moment
for a child, and for the hardy cattle,
kneeling at midnight in the fields
like humble kings. Absence
rises like an unsuspected mist;
the missing haunt all loss;
ice dusts the silence
of the end of years
And only my enduring angel, only
a seeing heart, can tell
how small it is, and how immense -
this gift of winter.
7. After
All this in darkness - misty fields,
dim thorns, a tentative thrush
singing of hard and bitter agony,
a bloody birth and a thin cry.
But the boomerang sun
is circling back, to knap this dull earth
to brilliant shards, sharp edge
another year of dawns.
There will be easts rimmed egg shell blue;
a gold line seeping pink, upswelling
harsher, more gold, and bursting through
to dazzle cold ground with leaves,
a promise for the hurt of thorns.
And there will be
a child’s believing fingers
round the driven nails;
thrush to answer thrush. | 
