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With Winter's Help
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This piece was inspired by the poet Jack Cooper's beautiful Poem "Empress Matilda Flees Oxford" shown below:
The city is sleeping without eyelids,
the army at its gate not seeing a woman
drop out the castle like ballast
wrapped in white:
a cloak and a blizzard.
She drifts under hornbeam and beech,
dead branches with a canopy of ice,
following the river to fields
as open and inviting as a kingdom without a king,
or a castle without its captor,
a place where the only straight lines are moonlight
and the horizon –
swallowing an empress –
Matilda crumbling in its mouth like a mint
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Link to Jack Cooper's Website:
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