Winter Landscape

The three men coming down the winter

In brown, with tall poles and a pack of

At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,

Past the five figures at the burning straw,

Returning cold and silent to their town,

Returning to the drifted snow, the

Lively with children, to the older men,

The long companions they can never reach,

The blue light, men with ladders, by the

The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy

To come, the evil waste of

Outstretched, they will be seen upon the

Of that same hill: when all their

Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in

Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and

By their configuration with the trees,

The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,

What place, what time, what morning

Sent them into the wood, a pack of

At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,

Thence to return as now we see them

Ankle-deep in snow down the winter

Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

Image - Pieter Brueghel,

Hunters in the Snow (1565)Kunsthistorisches Museum,

Vienna.