Moment by Irena Szirtes

The valley where I was born.                                                                                            credit Irena Szirtes

    My red terrier, and a moment on Frostrow Fell.          

Sting-soft kisses

slide into meltdown

over our faces,

as the sky falls

through steel silence.

Even my terrier waits,

not wiry, or raring to run,

loath to sully whiteout

with our footsteps.

Bent Dali-like

over Frostrow,

snowfall drapes hills

and, hunkering low

across peat-bogs,

smothers reeds, slides

into blackened streams.

We feel invisible,

melting into landscape;

fells terraform inside of me,

as influential as ancestors

in shaping who I am.

Suddenly wild geese

scissor the snowfall,

mesmerising, wild, as

their thin song echoes

my emergent sense of being.

 

Many days meld

into subconscious soup:

Not that day.

That day, decades behind,

is a piece of eternity

snatched from heaven,

scooped into linear time:

a fragment of gold in my pocket

to feel and finger secretly,

or pull out and look at

again, and again.

My red terrier                                                                credit Irena Szirtes