When the Winter Gave Me Flowers
By Erin C
Published 10 September 2024
It was wintertime when they landed,
bloomed out into unfolding
blue. From these limbs they
became cloud-cover,
constellations now, higher than my
quest for light would ever take me,
rising. I was unused to such breadth,
unspooling, these unending wild paths of flight.
They play the wind in C sharp breast stroke,
and I am all at once an instrument, their music
thrumming through my heartwood; letting the echo-space
take up the chorus, claws caressing these branches in the
ceaseless, screeching, feathered flurry
that keeps my old and aching branches
bright and blooming all year round.