Prologue

The citadel - an unhappy bride - ,
her fountains frozen, her bronze solitudes
no longer green but dressed in white,
her windows dark and cold,

surveys the city hung below,
the smoky trees, roads stretched suddenly wide
in whiteness, the river's loop
a rope of hair upon a naked back.

The only movement's colour in the sky,
black to pink to blue to pink to black.
And birds that prink about the snow,
plucking, flicking snow. That go.



The Hopeful City

To whom it draws them like a lung,
the ambitious and the young,
...