Winter Forest

In the static winter air
Beneath a darkening sky,
The forest keeps all movement still
As I go passing by.
If trees could speak we'd never hear,
They'd hold their voice when men went near,
But even silence has its words
And shadows have an eye.

The forest floor, a thousand years
Of rotted boughs and autumn leaves,
And buried trunks that bulge the ground,
As earth its own retrieves.
Underneath are creatures vile,
The mulch they're making all the while
Absorbs my tread, a sponge that spawns
The toadstool scent it breathes.

The branches comb the upper mist
For drips and runs that wet unclean
The poultice moss that clads the trunks
And lichen tufts between;
And ivy growth that grips and feeds
Like massive strangling centipedes
Or bloated veins on ancient legs,
The only winter green.

In a gully, dull and damp
Are streams that never tire
Of carving mud from under trees
That cling for balance dire;
And pallid slabs of greying snow
That melt into a pool below,
Sullen as it waits despatch
Knee-deep in sopping mire.

And in the giddy fans that vault
The Gothic-columned rides
Pigeons in high pulpits chant
In common voice that chides;
And reach by monotonic rote
Their querulous concluding note,
The same that all their forebears sang
And nothing more besides.

Two old trees with tangled tops
Stand only as each other's props;
But twig by twig they rot and snap,
Year by year they split and crack,
Until one day they stir the air
In final motion, crashing down,
They raise the rooks and start the wren,
To make his nest elsewhere.