Poem for Friday

Brueghel's Winter
By Walter de la Mare

Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green
Wall in the wild, cold scene below.
Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea
In freezing quiet of winter show;
Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood
Curling, skating, and sliding go.
To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze;
Peasants; a watching child; and lo,
Muffled, mute--beneath naked trees
In sharp perspective set a-row--
Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant,
Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow;
And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air
Swoops into space a crow.

But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.

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This county confuses me so much. They often close school the night before a storm based merely on a forecast of snow, but today, with an inch and a half on the ground and more falling fast, they opted to stay open the full day. My unplowed neighborhood became more and more non-navigable, so that by the time older son's bus reached the first nearby stop, I didn't want to drive through the snow to pick him up, and made him get his shoes wet walking home. Also, I am sure people with multiple cats know this already, but any good snow day is spent in large part moving cats off heating vents, which when you have three cats requires a lot of circuits and cat-booting. And naturally there has been no decision made about Friday morning delays yet.


Around the corner of the adjacent street...


Berries. Blurry because there was snow falling between me and them and I didn't know how to compensate for that.


Here I was trying to get a photo of the snow against the dark tree but that came out blurry!


Here you can get some idea how fast the snow was coming down.


Here you can vaguely see kids at the edge of the field through the trees throwing snowballs at each other.


And here are cats having a snow day. At this point they are waiting for something exciting to happen after being thrown off the heating vents again.

I had lots of laundry to fold, so I put on The Da Vinci Code on an impulse and younger son watched with me. Still not a great movie but I can half-watch the scenes at Temple Church, Westminster Abbey, Docklands, etc. and be very happy. We had Polish turkey sausage for dinner, Paul having concluded that we needed something spicy to counter the cold, then watched Star Trek's "Q Who" together because I need to review it...early Borg are always awesome, before Voyager ground them into the ground. And then younger son found Black Beauty on Animal Planet and left it on because of horsies, so I got to see David Thewlis and Eleanor Bron (it was already past the Sean Bean part).