Bosworth Field, 1485 – A Premonition

Stealthily, through silent mounds of sleep
dawn creeps, and morning mist, a shimmering
translucent-grey gauze, obscures field and hill,
concealing the face of fear with an umbered shroud.
(Who – who can know which way the wind will blow?)

So the pearl-grey dew, crawling over these leaden souls drips solitary tears through the armour of grey-eyed sleep,
as a white horse screams after some half-perceived phantom
soaring with lark-flight into an opalescent sky.
(Can the horse know which way the wind will blow?)

From that to this fixed stillness; the immobility of waiting;
pikemen, archers, the gently born, like so many grey statues
tipped with steel, honoured in the sun’s random knighthood.
Eyes and souls are one; neither boastful hazard, nor prayer
can truly know which way the wind will blow.

A flustered pennant subsides, embarrassed as at the false start
of a race, but stirs again, to filter through the army spread,
like a monstrous hedgehog, on Ambien Hill. Where it touches,
swift and cold, will there the eternal grey sleep reside?
(Only time can know which way the wind will blow.)

Its dying breath disturbs, almost imperceptibly, the dawn's
white horse; shivers upwards over flesh and armoured majesty; with faint chill anoints the troubled face and tortured crown
of him, who most of all, must ache to know
in which direction the wind will blow.