Hi Tony,
Thanks for your reading and comments. I think I have to disagree with you on your suggestion for reversing the final two lines as I wanted the narrator to misinterpret the scuffled snow at first before realising that a predator had been at work, in the same way as he had previously misinterpreted the frozen landscape as being devoid of life. However, I appreciate the fact that you offered the idea for consideration. It all helps in the process.
Thanks, Mike
--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---
I had just that moment said to my daughters "I wonder what it's like in
Finland this morning"...
lovely Mike
suggestion for last two line re-arrangement I've put in brackets
tony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Horwood" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 8:44 AM
Subject: New sub: Life and Death in the North
If any of you have been wondering what itīs like in Finland just now, itīs
quite a lot like this:
Life and Death in the North
This is the dead end of the year.
Nothing lives under this lowering sky.
The frozen air weighs like stone.
Booted and scarved and wool-wrapped to the ears
I step out on the empty land
where a line of distant pines divides
converging planes of white and grey.
This is the dead end of the world.
No life is possible here.
Everything warm has left, or lies
hidden and sleeping.
A graveyard of summerīs rushes
stand in frozen stasis at the ice-lakeīs rim
looking on the cold Medusa face,
impervious to the windīs persuasion.
Shadows over the untouched white
resolve to footprints of fingerīs-end size
where no feet can have run.
Is this the ice-light playing tricks?
Stepping closer I marvel to see them
sweep in lines between the stems,
twist, arc and double back,
colliding with companion trails.
In all these endless miles of cold,
under this unforgiving sky,
confounding all my previous prejudice,
a family of some tiny creatures had sported here.
And in the centre of their circling runs
a patch was wildly scuffed and trodden,
(as if a preditor had surprised them at play
or the happy band had held a midnight dance.) ?
Mike
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