I can’t let bad news on Covid, narcissus fly losses and me griping about paying excessive prices on ebay (when no one is forced to part with their money) pass without offering something positive. So here’s a little poem for the shortest day.
Snowdrop – Ted Hughes
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths.
She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
As the globe has ‘shrunk tight’, predators weasel and crow struggle to survive in winter’s dark, the mouse hibernates in the earth and, like stars in a cold sky, the snowdrop flowers, albeit ‘pale’ and with ‘metal’ for petal.