A Hibernation Poem (after a freezing cold day!)

I wrote this after braving a very chilly Boxing Day at Marsh Farm (not a bird in sight that day!) on the Wirral: 

The Cold (or Brown Winter)

The Mersey tracts

And the dulling banks

Brownly heave with the

Sleeping beat of

Slough-stuck animals:

Twisted in their holes.

They’ll wake up bone; frozen

Smeared in three months’ tallow

Like slick children

From earthen wombs.

Winter stings through the

Reed and bramble beds;

Goes stinking through the

Gristling limbs of sad

Dead fledglings:

Birds born pre-mature,

In spit-made suburbs;

Pitched from the nest –

The ice-ground snagged

The blackbird’s young.

The shrew shrinks from it,

The birds shun it and

Leave for Italy-heat,

To become a family meal:

Better than morass and chill.

And in the brown river-mist

And the gaping bridge-held holes

- the transit:

The old pass on and

The children turn on

And the cold destroys it all.