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10th January, 2025

Friday Poem – ‘Birch’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

Photo of bare trunks of silver birch standing in the snow.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Birch’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams from her sequence ‘The Tree Calendar’ republished in The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems.

Birch
December 24th – January 20th
After Twelfth Night comes the reality
of winter. When the greenery’s stripped down
it’s barefaced, blowing under the door.
Mean days dragging out a fraction more
before dark, make our myth of spring
ridiculous. I walk out into the stark
endless moment of January.
Old snow slumps in the hedge,
stretching the fields
wet to the birchwood, raw
black tangle against the grey.
Mud ruts, brown ice under my boot
snaps and seeps as I trudge up
to the sad ranks of trees, the thin
skin birches in their thaw.
These brittle twigs swept clear of leaves
whipping along the light,
points of dark bud concealing green,
I’ll tie a bundle to my broom, for flight:
no shelter here, the rain falls through
this frostwood, the sky stares between.
The bramble jags, the stag horns of the scrub
bad musk of leafmould, in the dusk
that stirs behind my shoulder.
Birch stems lean to the loud stream
crowding beneath the wind,
thrashing their rods at winter stumps,
at the cracked, dimwit days.
Think of the woods brushed with a green haze.
Think of the covered hills
filling with cleaner light, and a gap
in the clouds for something to glance through.
I stoop in a cold shade
gathering twigs for a journey