The first snowdrop of the season brings hope of spring

How many glass freezer containers that you can bake in

Does a woman need? I wonder, as I peel off many, many labels,

Softening the glue on the Rayburn and shredding fingernails.

I shift and tidy and make better the spaces around me but guilt

Imagines emails screaming for attention through my office walls

Until finally, I check them to find that I’m two days behind a deadline

I didn’t know I had; a Q&A for ‘George’ is going into the paperback.

The chill eye of a seagull on an Aberystwyth seafront Sunday

Warns off the pigeons. My fish and chips on a pavement bench

Have alerted the skyborne audience to possible offers; I am keen

To fulfil all their hopes. It is the most fun I can have

With a deep-fried vegetable beneath a sky as grey as tin

In front of the fermenting winter sludge of an Irish sea.

The shooting season ends and pheasants explode onto the road

From every hedgerow in their efforts to elude a sudden death.

My two huskies eye their jewel-encrusted feathers hungrily

As they glitter through the undergrowth. One opens its beak

To protest at dogs; the screech from the back of its throat

Hacks at a blackboard with rusty chalk. The cool white silence

Of newly sprung snowdrops as they proliferate, is antidote.