Poem: ‘The Curlew’
Paul Batchelor, 20 April 2017
Sighs & groans. As it crawls to a standstill the train becomes a fortress.
Outside: pitiless silence. Emptied sky. Snowbound farms. Ever-deepening blue.
The vulnerable economies of owl & fox. Fields brushed, as by a comet’s tail, with winter.
No announcement. No sign of the guard. We have reached the threshold, it is everywhere at once
in depthless white drifts unbroken...