By Gillian Clarke
We're brought to our senses, awake
to the black and whiteness of world.
Snow's sensational. It tastes
of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold.
Ball it between your palms
to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak.
Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech,
gather its laundered linen in your arms.
A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden
burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!
ice is whispering. Night darkens,
the mercury falls in the glass, glistening.
Motorways muffled in silence, lorries stranded
like dead birds, airports closed, trains trackless.
White paws lope the river on plates of ice
in the city's bewildered wilderness.
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Sunday, much like Saturday, mostly involved half-watching football while sucking cough drops and sipping tea (I still have no sense of smell or taste, so this wasn't as much fun as it should have been). I do go out, masked, for about half an hour to Safeway for supplies, but otherwise I did a lot of dozing and a little reading.
Cheryl, Paul, and I watched the What If...? season premiere (fun, we don't get enough Sam/Bruce in canon), then I watched Happy Howlidays, which is overlong but set in Seattle and has a dog named Russell after Russell Crowe (because of Gladiator, though Gerard Butler and Chris Hemsworth get named too).
Now we're watching the stressful season finale of Dune: Prophecy, which I'm very happy is getting a second season even though it's a messed-up Imperium -- amazing how hereditary patriarchy doesn't often end well even for the hereditary patriarch, though sisterhood doesn't fare any better. Orchids at the Volunteer Park Conservatory:
