Winter sunlight, fool's gold, pours in the south window,
fails to warm. Weak as tea, pale as bone, insubstantial

The ground outside, hard, white as the hospital bed
where my friend waits after her marrow transplant,
hoping her white count will rise. I watch birds at the window—
sparrows, titmice, finches—the plain brown, the speckled,
the ordinary, no flashy travelers up from the tropics,
where winter is a verb, not a state of the heart.
I go out to fill the feeder, feel silky grain slip
through my fingers: millet, proso, corn. Little birds,
little angels, singing their small song of consolation.
A thin drizzle of sun slips through clouds,
a strand of hope against the icy odds.
"Hope" by Barbara Crooker, from The White Poems. © Barnwood Publishers, 2001.
Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).
I read this one, and read it over, and all I could say to myself was "wow!"
ReplyDelete"a strand of hope against the icy odds." Some days that's all we have. So much captured in such a compact poem.
ReplyDelete