The Killing Frost

The Killing Frost I think the leaves down on my roof of tin. I feel the failing brightness on my skin. Autumn insects sing the shadows thin. You come to me out of a killing frost. How many wildflowers did your journey cost? Your eyes are cold-gold with the sun you lost. My fingers write the season of your face. Leaves whisper songs no morning could replace. The music plays inside as we embrace. Glass mirrors a gray bowl of simplicity. Your telling of the fog is poetry. Words fill the emptiness of you and me. Color is raining somewhere far away. I close my heart to what the sad leaves say. Good-bye would be too real for me today. Would you catch me a color for belief? The poem must be ours however brief. We might not know the song of next year's leaf. -Sandra Fowler Winter Morning Darkness thins and thins till shapes emerge out of the covering blackness. Like charcoal sketches the old barn with its lone sentinel cedar, muted with mist, and the woodshed and the smokehouse stand forthdiscovered once again. The slumbering hollow gives in to morning as almost-liquid light spreads like incoming tide along the valley floor. Winter wheat, new-planted in summer's tobacco patch surprises the sober landscape like sudden unexpected joycoaxes hopeful green from quiescent, frost-bound land, like a well-guarded secret waiting to be told. -Barbara Mabry A Woman Forgetting the Death of Her Sons Names failed her when she nodded late Upon the trick of binding broom, And, hunkered there beside the jamb, She spoke to no one in the room. I warn you from the speckled clot, Break up the yard's blood dark and red, But leave three sprigs upon the floor Where for this woman day is sped. Leave small the mountain-lion stalk, The dusty vein and pith, yet more, O bind with speckled red three sprigs And leave the day's blood on the floor. -Woodridge Spears 55 ...