A BUXTON SNOW SCENE 1906

You stare back at me

From the photograph's sepia season
Forever frozen in winter

I trace your dark tracks strung out across

A sledding scene of nineteen hundred and six,

Atop the Slopes near Buxton park where the

Serpentine is stilled, its coils, cowed,
Inanimate, amid the season's chill.

Rows of children standing stiffly to attention,

Already cocooned in adulthood,

Wrapped warmly in parental wear,

And weighted down in bonnets and caps,

Stare at me from their walled-in lives,

Hung and framed like inmates in an ice-berg cell.

The modern convention of the inane smile has not

Yet corrupted the sensibilities of this scene,

As they pose for the photograph which takes an age to

Compose and capture,  their faces, pale, stern,
Frowning forever

Compressed upon the glacial plate,  

Yet on closer inspection, 

Through the camouflage of conformity,

Eyes etched with excitement,

Erupt and crater the still decorum.

You wait to take your turns like

Patient dominoes all in serried row,

Black on white and white on black,  

Peppering and dotting the all-prevailing snow,

A world uniform and balanced,

You grip your tiny sledges, 
Vulnerable,

Amid the winter's bleak attack.

At risk of being blown away,

At the whim of wind or fate,

Like leaves fallen haphazardly,

Your prints pattern the tilting ground,

All  crows' feet stitching amid

The raven’s ratcheting dance.

Senseless to your fate and the decade ahead
Your frozen smiles explode and

Strafe this frigid moment,

You thrill as you anticipate your reckless,

Raw descent,

Cut, tear and scissor the pallid quilt,

Which you forever rent,

Headlong, downwards, ever sliding,

Unhindered by the sombre angel yet to be built.

Stephen Evans June 2014