Winter roads (iii)

poem

Iris Shaw, December 2025

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Here's nothing

But the driving drifting snow

Wits gone wanting

I go

Watching the pale world

Caught up by patience,

Passions curled

Upon themselves:

Wake nothing

That sleeps, walk

Through silence

Safely haunted

By quiet ground beneath;

In your hands a wreath

In the still air a voice, no breath

Carried home and out of time

With ageless reason and no rhyme —

Now I go, return, now

There's nothing but the snow;

Now the world is out of tune with death.