Easter Saturday, Hyde Park
Winter’s piggy-backing spring, squeezing ribs
with icy thighs, scoring her pale haunches
with his whistling crop. Pigeons are downed
by rat-a-tat hail, sheltering their pates
as brittle as biscuit or Eucharist host,
dazed from the air turning grapeshot and grey.
It’s at a loss, this apocryphal day:
parenthesised by murder and grace,
never knowing whether to storm or shine,
to pitch winter into The Serpentine
or let him beggar these bones to the ground
and ride the year into the knacker’s yard.
So I think I’ll sit it out with Peter Pan
and see if Sunday wakes me as lost boy or man.
*Simon Barraclough is author of Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt 2008), Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins 2010) and 'Neptune Blue' (Salt, July 2011).