Waking After Eighteen Hundred Dead
Prayer began early
before the sterling jays
dove, then clattered
at our window,
flicked the blue dark
storm of their tails.
Our pale trees bow down
secretly
and a nuthatch
teeters upside down
from the post of the birdfeeder
I buried with stones
another spring,
his thin straight beak
tapping at the seed
I leave out all night.
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My breath,
how lightly it floats
in this chill spring
like a delicate frost
of air
I can walk through.
I take the wood axe
from our tool shed
to split the old wood we felled
and stacked years past.
Last night I stood alone
in the deepening dusk,
in the silence,
as if I could rename each
splinter of star
I did not know.
And then the pink moon
soft as the fingertips
of the dead
slid over the mountain
and I lit fires
beneath a moon
full of far blossoms.
How long ago it seems,
springs
when we could just count
the catkin on the budding aspen
and step so carefully
through the winter grass
so as not to crush
the white globes of the wind
flowers lifting themselves
from the cold earth.
Kathryn Winograd lives in Littleton. She wrote this from her cabin in Teller County.