An aged mother swathed in mourning clothes
a morning coat, dark and cloistered
She goes everywhere in black, a mother crow, shriveled and puckered with age and the chill is set deep in her bones and creased into her face like frozen peaks of snow. At night she tucks her head under a black wing, tightly winding and growing harder in her center part, her soul part. Winter will kill her.
For the promise of Spring she keeps breathing. When it arrives she rejoices, her breath turns from silver to gold, caught in the light of an unending daytime. Her heart thump-thumping and loud, blood coursing and she rouses to stretch her wings.
In that rush, a warming and quickening, her layers shed and she stands, unwinding and thawing and lifting her breastbone to the sun. She closes her eyes, hung in the hammock of glowing Summer. The inside of her eyelids sparkle, flecks of sunlight captured in warm granite, rosy and twinkling. At home in the sunlight, a child of warmth, a golden girl finally emerges from the black garments, now kicked aside.
