These criss-cross lines printed on the snow
are bones of trees laid bare by the moon.
We should not be looking so hard
at what a tree would rather keep to itself.
Would we not fear to be shown
how like replicas we are, and how mechanical?
Let’s play that game again, stepping out
along the branches – pretending to tip –
as if we still believed we couldn’t fall.
Katharine Towers (The Remedies, Picador, 2016)

This poem is from Katharine Towers’ The Remedies, currently shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize (the result of which will be announced next Sunday). It seems perfect for this time of year: the quiet patch of time after Christmas, the turning point of the new year which has few expectations and a feeling of meditation and introspection. But, unusually, the poem invites us not to examine truths too closely – they are ‘mechanical’ – and to rely instead on the confidence of youth; ‘pretending to tip’, but really safe within the inability to imagine anything going wrong. What we need, the poem suggests, is to be brave; or if not consciously courageous, then blithe and gung-ho.