After the lunch he gets his folder
of Christmas games.

And now you’re half a spin of the world away,
somewhere I’ve never been, like Narnia . . .

Once there was nothing sweeter than snow

We pick up where you left off, searching still,
choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck:
twenty-one crows in a night-time tree,
deep within the dark, with all that chatter

As regular as Santa Claus, she’d call
around at Christmas, the next-door neighbour
and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs Williams.

It is always Christmas in the loft

Picture this:
little witch girl
in Alaskan wilderness.

On the way to the registry office it snows, flecks of white like spittle hitting the steamed-up bus windows, I worry the petals from my wedding posy.

. . . Now the villages is
en fête: dressed for a party in the dark,
across the fields, along uneven paths . . .