Ice and Snow

I am more at home
when out on icy city streets,
for all their seeming cruelty,
moving along salty pavements,
cold-surfaced, tramped bare,
endlessly worn, glassily patched
and, for all their occasional danger,
warmer somehow; less at home
when staying in snowy outskirts,
thick-blanketed, seemingly safe
but waiting under silent cover,
smothered by the oneness,
the over-wintering whiteness
which, for all its softness, hides
a hard and unforgiving earth.