Impression - winter 1977
I don't remember clearly
how it was at Tsarskoe Selo…
goose-feather skies that dramatised
the rich viridian of walls;
an absent amber chamber, stolen
piecemeal as the spoils of war;
reeds of ice, thin faery pipes
fingered lightly by the winds;
snow-hares by the frozen pond
too delicate to focus on - by the time
you trained your gaze on them,
the shadow-forms had gone,
and clouds had reassembled
into cohorts of white swans…
Beneath the polar pelt of winter
Catherine's parkland slumbered on;
coaxed from crevices in stone
by radiant ceramic stoves
came echoes of a woman's voice,
fragments of a housemaid's song…