Ritual

Haworth Hodgkinson

Just before midnight
on Christmas Eve
my mother gives me cards
to deliver
to the house on the hill.

Hunched into the Arctic roar,
I climb the rough-stoned track,
imagining I can hear
other sounds,
lost and blown away:

a railway with steam trains,
the paper mill's drone,
the periodic thud
of the gun-cotton factory.

Here, the only silence comes
from the ferry terminal
and the deep-sea trawler dock,
their tacets buried
in the storm.

At the top of the hill
the wind stops;
the house is frozen,
no lights, no sound.

Only a robin sings,
defiant in the winter's ruin.

Written 2014

Published in Frost on the Tassie, 2014
(Lemon Tree Writers)