The Foundling

Snow wraiths circle us Like washers of the dead, Flapping their white wet cloths Impatiently About the grizzled head, Where the coarse hair mats like grass, And the efficient wind With cold professional baste Probes like a lancet Through the cotton shirt... About us are white cliffs and space. No façades show, Nor roof nor any spire... All sheathed in snow... The parasitic snow That clings about them like a blight. Only detached lights Float hazily like greenish moons, And endlessly Down the whore-street, Accouched and comforted and sleeping warm, The blizzard waltzes with the night.