From Things You Find in a Poet's Beard by A.F. Harrold

Frost spins white lines

on the lawn,

grass turns glass-like,

crisp crackle-snap

underfoot.

Forest could keep secrets
Forest could keep secrets

We're floating into the blue,
Me and my blue balloon.
Over the rooftops of the town,
The brown fields and the trees
And the Downs – we're floating,

Here now skyline assembles fire.
The sun collects up to leave.
Its bright following paled,
suddenly all goes. Dusk rushes
in, like door closed on windowless room.

The seagulls are doing their dance again – Wings clasped to their sides, they stare up the street.
Up and down, up and down, go their knobbly pink knees;

After the fiftieth insult - 

the school bag down the toilet, the stifled

giggle-whisper that hung like a smear on the air - 

she suddenly saw

This morning she got up
On the happy side of the bed,
Pulled back
The grey sky-curtains
And poked her head
Through the blue window
Of heaven,

Which can be brushed out long and fine
to lie across a pillow
or bunched and scrunched into an angry
knot of rain before it is undone, 
when long hanks of it hang

We don' have a Springtime like some folk
Who live in dem colder place,
but we have a time when de soft rain come,
an' tease open de seedcase

We turn our faces up and jiggle thirty toes,
Morse-coding longing with our restless beat.
When will it come?
Shepherds on the first Nativity, we scan the skies
and huddle,