Marjorie A. Buettner...

The Song of the Stars

When the snow, pocked-marked by rain, falls into itself, and the raspberry bushes look like barbed wire, it is time to regret the absence of winter. Just as a prisoner loves confinement, a loner, lovelessness, I crave the mummified distance of a winter night; wrapped in its sheets of cold and ice, it does not give itself away. All that it asks from us is indifference. Instead, we have lost measures of sleep to find, in February, a bare and useless ground--frozen to touch. Yet the stars tonight are as feather-soft as the snow-blown back of a bird's neck and sound, in their flight across the sky, like ten-thousand warbled voices green. The night, cupped around our ears like a sea-shell, has a blood-rush music all its own. And these ever-fixed, ever-changing stars (like a lost friend or the death of one loved) are transposed, noted and found in the air, on the trees, and over this crystallized ground teaching us, once again, how to sing.

end of winter my daughter's rain stick sounding like the sea

WHCHaibun 2002-03-01