By Tom Johnson
in the first sun of the new year
I’m thinking of our drive home on the first morning
after christmas
how the sky was all strung out
the clouds creaking under the weight of the
snow they were carrying in their folds and creases
in the far off distance
a huge flock of geese were flying in formation
to return or to arrive
so many, but so far away that from our crooked view
up through the windscreen
they looked like small rips in the sky’s fabric
jagged pencil lines scratched into a photograph
I watched them grow as they flew slowly closer
to eventually pass right overhead, gently forming into
shapes that could only be geese,
no longer aberrations on the landscape now that you could see
their long necks outstretched, their wide wings beating
as they flew toward a new year
as they flew silently out of sight I closed my eyes
to feel the roll of the car wheels in motion
I thought of the snow as it waited to fall
I pictured myself in the mountains to the north
and I thought of my family far away to the south,
and in doing so I worked out where the geese were headed;
East, of course
but for how long and how far
I didn’t have an answer for
– and I still don’t, not even now