Winter - a poem by Chris Zachariou

Α Young Woman in a Field of Poppies

Camelot, cloaked in mists,

shimmers on the distant hilltops.
I see my footprints, faint and cracked

at its bolted gates.

She dresses quietly, our eyes
never meet and Guinevere leaves
even before the door has closed.

In silence, I sit late into the night

listening for her footsteps, but I know

the trains have stopped running.

In a panic, I run into my world
between the pencil and the page.
I write all my memories,

some true, most imagined—
imagined memories are better
than no memories of her at all.

Snow is falling on the roof.
May’s poems shiver on the page,
the garden spiders died in September
and the nights are drawing in.

Winter has arrived.