Snowed In<\/strong><\/p>\nLying in bed, I listened to the muffled deadness
\nof falling snow, the world gone deaf,
\nblanked out, its heart shut close,<\/p>\n
snow banking up, mutely filling the lane,
\nsweeping in waves, cresting the hedges,
\nmiles of white stretching to the coast.<\/p>\n
He came to me through the snow at midnight
\nlike a dream. His car abandoned at the top of the valley,
\nhe waded in oil-skins and galoshes through the drifts<\/p>\n
to hammer and shout at my door. In such weather,
\nwouldn’t you, even a single woman
\nin an isolated cottage, let a stranger in?<\/p>\n
I knew who he must be. No one but a doctor,
\nmidwife or vet would be out in a white-out.
\nMy dog stopped barking, as he let her sniff<\/p>\n
his hand and squirmed in pleasure as he caressed her.
\nI did not know when I opened the door,
\nsnow would continue to fall,<\/p>\n
even when spring came, and summer,
\na deep drift of impenetrable snow
\nwe could not dig through, would not thaw.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stephanie Green<\/strong> has an MPhil in C\/W from Glasgow University (2004).\u00a0 \u2018Flout\u2019, her pamphlet inspired by Shetland landscape, folklore and culture, will be published by HappenStance, 2015 and launched at StAnza.\u00a0 Originally London-based, she moved, via Wales, to Edinburgh in 2000.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Closed Window<\/strong><\/p>\nShe finds the photo he sent her
\nof the leadlight window they slept under.<\/p>\n
She remembers the single bed, the Surrey flat;
\nwinter\u2019s spectral morning creeping through
\nthe rose-quartz and frostwork panes,
\nmarbling his face;
\nhow they curled
\ntheir hands around mugs of steaming tea,
\nfelt bare floorboards under bare feet,
\nshivered under the coverless duvet;
\nhow the still air held a faint trace
\nof evening\u2019s bonfire, its damp remains.<\/p>\n
Like children, they had puffed out
\nclouds of breath and steamed up
\nthe mirror, shrouding their faces.<\/p>\n
On the back of the photo:
\nthe words to a song,
\nhis smudged and faded writing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Karen Dennison<\/strong>‘s poems have been published in magazines and anthologies. She won the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition in 2011 and her first collection Counting Rain<\/em> was published in February 2012. Karen is editor and publisher of the pamphlet Book of Sand.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Flurry Window panes bear the weight of winter snow. Something unseen leaves ice fingerprints on glass. Inside the debris: torn paper hats novelty shrapnel from crackers screwed-up fists of wrapping paper. Carollers sing of birds and gold rings. You twist the band on your finger where a vein runs to the heart. His face […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twelve-days-of-christmas-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7959"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23956,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7959\/revisions\/23956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}