The temperature bleaches the mud,
The puddles turn wrinkled and cloudy
In strange formations.
The ground is iron hard
And whitened into
Winter rigidity.
The earth at midwinter,
Contracted in on itself
Like a body in womblike retreat.
All the souls
Of the dead, their bones
Whitened into powder,
Eaten and changed in
The deep, solid clods.
The sun eases
Into the sky in
Its knife watery light,
Faint in a whisper of time.
Until the Dark
Cold blanket folds
Over, in everlasting
Northern night,
Swallowed into Midwinter
Still - dark - hard
And the deepest
Earliest griefs
Rise and bob
Abandoned, electrified in
Their old life, rise still bleeding
In the winter night,
Around in the unconscious
Existing in tandem
With the Christmas lights
And chaos of shopping bags and choirs,
Seized up trains, passengers left in
The wrong place, crying in tunnels,
Desperate shoppers
Ploughing through
The High Street,
Strangled in scarves.
And in the
Dark tomb of the soul I meet
The poor child
Who started my life….
As the parents’ white bones shift in their graves,
Transformed into a breath of eternity.
© Valerie Taylor
all rights reserved
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