Closing In

A bleak midwinter in mid-March

The broken promise of Spring’s warm embrace

Black ice and the roads closed to traffic

Thick fog and a sky free of planes

The consoling silence interrupted

by a wind with a gale-force chip on its shoulder

Birds in the know have flown, the sticklers

tight-beaked, fastened to bare branches

For fear of being outnumbered

children have stopped building snowmen

Above the Thames, a drone, frozen in mid-flight,

drops like a stone, smacks through the ice

On the lawn, a snow leopard

lies in wait for the fox cubs

Who is that on the horizon

staggering through the blizzard?

Can it be April? April to the rescue?

Sadly, no. A snowman closing in on a lost child.