Blanket Blocked

Months - if feels like years - ago, our Weston Poets group were set the topic of "Blanket" as the theme of our next Weston Poets meeting.

Well, I confess I have been well and truly blocked on Blanket. 

I have two images, but they will not form themselves into poetry. 

One is our now home ground, smoothed by a gleaming layer of sweet white snow, crisp and perfect, lying there a magic gift from heavy, low dark skies of yesterday, with tiny sparkles from a white sun so weak that it can scarcely lift its head above the wood's fine tracery, 

 and deep in this vision of purity is my four year old self, skipping ecstatic from my kitchen door to find my winter world transformed into a magic shining incomprehensible land of whiteness, 

 and now my dancing child is overseen by a darker, silent self who knows this magic carpet is slipping away, flying lower year by year because another blanket it changing; 

a huge dark sphere of perfect shadow, black as the snow is white, clothed with a rim, the finest, narrowest shim of blue and gold wrapped round our home 

so thin, but strong enough to keep this space rock warm enough for us and all life to live and breathe and love, 

 a narrow band of air so fine between the soil that gives us food 

and an infinity of freezing space, 

our air is changing, slowly, but so rapidly, changed by the rattling coals that kept my kitchen warm, changed by the immensities of blackness that bleed and scrape power from the heart of rock beneath our feet, 

under the skim of soil, under the rock of ages cleft for us all to live our plastic lifestyle, to live so well, but now, 

 but now we know that we must not change the infinitesimal blue gold blanket into a weight that smothers us out of sweaty sleep, to find the night time air is all too hot, to find the shower will not run its cooling streams, to lie down and feel our heart speed up impossibly and in a living nightmare pass away to leave a damaged world for that young wondering child