Last night was very windy, so much so, that when I awoke to an other-worldly crashing sound at 1.30, the house was in pitch-blackness. There was a power outage and the street lights were out and the small table lamp we often leave on in the front room was extinguished.

Stumbling through the dense inkiness of a light-less house, I glanced out a window. Trees were bending in impossible poses, then whipping back the other way. Nameless objects bounced and shot across grass and street, helpless in the sheer pummeling of the gale.

Back in bed, with Ann's steady breathing to settle me, Ted Hughes Wind popped into my head, whole verses intact over twenty years. Such is the power of suggestion and the connections we make between our lived past and the very moment we are in.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.