by PM Flynn

After Out of the Grey’s, “Winter Sun”

Remember the ocean’s stillness on rainy days 
or the smoke of prayers smaller than 
harvest fields or hands lacking oil or wine?
Starlings harvest this day’s swirling excess, 
in the highest trees scraping daylight threaded 
through the fluttering distance, through a past 
altered with windows crowded with plants. 
The grayest thoughts drift to desire, 
or every light without conditions.  
Waiting for a winter sun, I find a midnight sky 
carries the sparkling snow; gray shadows
that fall in the lucid moonlight. 
Looking up, the snow floats down
between memories drifting in from the tree line, 
far above where I first became winter, 
as the first snow fell for a child wearing
excess clothes that always touched the ground. 
(Such is the power of nature without Him.) 
Circling branches balance rounded limbs 
where sprawled snow breaks away 
and shivers across the chilled earth. 
Ground unburied in spring has its terms but,
too often, winter is taller than any street or town. 
(In time, snow closes a city.)
But you are winter, the white flesh of eternity, 
frozen rivers from clouds tipped to icy winds 
and larger than snow falling on this evergreen. 
The nearby haze becomes more snow settling 
on the dull forest darkness brightened by the 
whitest daylight all year—brown bark that will be
bleached pure in the smallest shadows of eternity.

PM Flynn is a North Carolina writer. He holds a B.S. in English from East Carolina University, roasts organic coffee and has been published in many fine print and online anthologies, newsletters, and literary magazines and reviews including Helen Literary Magazine, the Fictional Café, Main Street Rag, The Grassroots Women’s Project, Port Folio Weekly, The Mirror/Slush, Anti-Heroin Chic, 50 Haikus, Fleas on the Dog Online Quarterly, CactiFur, etc.