Catherine Baker
Green Man in Midwinter Green Man’s bone weary.
His breath stinks of ditchwater and half-bletted sloes. His cuffs are full of leaf mould. Frost tendrils snake through his beard. Fierce ice-rimed owl calls waken him grimly at dawn. There’s no rest for him – the world in its winter sleep turns inside his wakefulness. Rain slips down his neck, but Green Man keeps on walking. Nothing’s growing now but the kingdom of the dark. He’s beating the bounds for us, holding his lantern against the lowering sky, whistling tunelessly a song of hard-won patience, a song of the earth, turning. ❦ |
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no path climbs the hill except the one the wind makes whitening the grass geese in the orchard pick over the bruised apples better than nothing in the blue light under clouds at the low point of the year thick rusty brambles hide the snickets and tunnels where the foxes run liquid as the moonlight on the telltale tips of their tails |
gulls body the wind tilting through the leaf-spirals in the fling of trees step outside and hear the rain talking to itself in the water butt crowflight carves the air in one elegant clean swoop black over grey roofs Grey on grey, the wind flings a handful of seagulls from here to nowhere. |
More Selected Haiku and Tanka
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the space inside trees
full of green shifting leaflight sliced through by finches with scimitar certainty in the quickening of spring hope like a far hill in the grey light of morning rising regardless the darkness of trees making a gift of the light in winter starkness framing their clear panes of air just these ones, always changing |
open the window and let the moonlight float in washing the linen how flimsy the fence that keeps me out of the wood its firm intentions shouldered aside by badgers and ducked by the dancing hare darkness before dawn sliding off a wet slate roof the eye of the moon |
a tree made of air
its flowers more green than white last visible thing in the draining of the light its own ghost, water-scented the first bumblebee drunk on so little sunshine blunders through the wood along the main road thorn trees step out of the mist pale and distracted their thoughts visible in clouds of cold blossom round their heads |