A seasonal post: a poem I wrote three years ago.

I’m more at home when out
on icy city streets,
for all their seeming cruelty,
on salty pavements,
cold-surfaced, tramped bare,
endlessly worn, glassily patched
and – for all their occasional danger
– somehow warmer;

less at home when in
these snowy outskirts,
thick-blanketed, seemingly safe
but seething under silent cover,
smothered by the oneness,
the over-wintering whiteness
which – for all its softness – hides
a hard and unforgiving earth.