Time was, they would air lift food supplies

to hill farms trenched in snow for months.

We've not seen that here for twenty years.

Christmas is warm and wet, viruses spoiling

through the closed-in valleys like gossip.

February, no doubt, will be the same slide

into March, weeks of white-lid skies, least

path a mud slick, weather a little deeper

in your joins. That year, pipes froze so hard

you had to hold a candle to the joints and hope

for the crack, the break, the fissure in the ice,

a two bar fire on your wall a surgeon's mask,

dull, red, ugly but utterly wonderful when the

power returned. The Thames froze and milk

arrived on skis to burst tops on doorsteps

like over-proved bread; across Devon sheep

cocooned like embryos in blue tombs,

the lamb replete and perfect in its birth sac.

Now these supplicant frostings at New Year

are sticking plasters on the black wound

of the earth, an inch of ice-cube snowballs

friable as buck shot. There's blossom

in the lane, birds have begun their relay

of twig and feather, crows tumble catch-me

in the humid air andwe've given up on winter

when all of a sudden overnight in Heptonstall

a muffler drops a white sheet over the moor.