November
Your hair thick as mooring rope –
I wound it round my hand
pulled your body close,
walking kept us warm
on the spider-silk threads
of a ploughed field
the oak and horse chestnut
compassed their last leaves –
like old women with rosaries
sending hail Marys to a stern
Atlantic squall, we pressed
against the broken gate
arms and faces set with cold
as autumn’s last frontier
bruised us through our clothes
and nobody could see
through the blackthorn hedge
from our path, so nobody
could know what passed, beyond
the lake soon to be eaten by ice
beyond the redwing’s whistling
call, the herd of fallow deer
in the copse, light-footed as snow.
Alexandra Strnad read English at the University of Cambridge, and graduated with Distinction from the Master’s in Creative Writing programme at the University of Oxford. In 2014, Alexandra won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published in a range of journals and anthologies.