Footballers in the Snow

The dark comes early now on Saturdays.

Under the aurorae of the floodlights’

huge radiant dice, the teams’ jerseys glow

like a kid’s painting, and the luminous

 

raincoats of the police on crowd control

are warm as pub windows. But overhead

a polar winter exhales. Its breath

and its long night, its powercut, sweep south.

 

The first flurry of snow blows in as if

the planet had lurched like a drunk on ice.

The fans blur on the opposite terrace.

The linesman evaporates on his line.

 

The yellow cops, the footballers in red

and blue, waver, diminish and recede.

The vast pitch whitens under the flakes thrown

sideways into the stadium. The goals

 

are swallowed up by light years of bleached ground.

It’s as if some impatient cosmic

law (of entropy, say) had raised its hand.

As if the world’s end was in this last glimpse

 

of twenty-two men in colourless shirts

and the single figure in black, who stops

in the faint tracks he has just noticed

and raises a whistle to his lips.