I was woken by a whisper of snow which defied the pearlescent sun and the warmth of the earlier week and touched the honeyed earth. A kiss. But with the wetness of tears. Poetry was read in the white light of it. Tragic verse, blood-dipped, laced with love. At night I slept with words I had written on the edges of my mind and they bled into my dreams, made them strange and beautiful and unbearably unfamiliar.
Crows spotted white-frosted fields. They paced stoically, as if – I think, still wrapped in the fabric of the poem – keeping watch over sacred goings-on which have been hidden from me by the sudden burst of cold. As if some great thing has suffered an unexpected injury and the world was devoting all its energy to saving it. I searched the cottage for him, to ask him what has happened, to explain to me the feeling of serene dread which has pressed upon my chest. But he was not there. So I sat with a cup of black coffee on the bench by the kitchen window. The crows went on pacing, ever vigilant. The threadbare blanket of gray stretched across the sky battled the sun. I sat and I waited for him to return. I waited. I wait.
This poem originally appeared in the March 2026 edition of The Brazen Head
*(image: January: Cernay, near Rambouillet, by Léon-Germain Pelouse)