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published
at Bow-Wow
Shop;
and
part of the British Library Digital
Archive
February Charm
It won’t be long now,
the February struggle
through
a plateau of low reserves and cold.
Daylight
enough to get home before dark,
enough
to see it’s the bottom of the end.
The
marshes will be water-filled a long time,
maybe
in June they still won’t be passable.
Years
back, I could cross all through those
dry
winters — in a good frost, no trouble.
I
put a charm into the end of February,
a
stake I want to lose. It isn’t yet begun,
so
never mind the little enchantments
like
crocuses the ground has hoarded up:
other
plants can struggle all through winter,
and
die in March. But the gift, when I stand
one
day soon in a patch of old grass and reed
as
the caterpillar trainset rattles to Chingford,
that
depends on what I give up now, as if
my
charm has made the spring; the spring
will
release my own little wheel, and the bell
that
wakes my effort to believe it’s what there is.
Peter Daniels
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