Spring

The sparrows banter in the bushes that crowd the walls of the World’s End alleyway as I walk to the library.

There is, it seems, much to catch up on. Winter was bitter cold; five months that had us by the throat, five months in our house that were bone lonely.

April. And earth is touched by the hand of a new sun. A sun, from its stoked store, that wants to warm us,

pulls at zips, unbuttons a thick-coated Saxon taciturn resistance. The releasing rays bring back lost leisure: walking back home, in the dry dust

of my road, a black and white tabby reclines, eyes me disdainfully with the look of a Cleopatra on an invisible chaise longue.