Birches in February
☙ ❧

Posted in Poetry • August 20, 2022

Author's Note: I am currently uploading some of my old writing while I get the site set up. I originally wrote this poem in 2010 in a creative writing course and published it in a small online literary magazine that no longer exists.

Who knows if they're the fingers of
some long-dead giant,
reduced by gust and gale to pale weathered bone
that sticks spindling out of the ground?

Or what if it's not a dead giant,
but merely a slumbering one,
cozily nestled under blankets of clay and topsoil, leaf and mold,
silently waiting to be kissed awake by Spring?

The branches are now thick with snow.
A cardinal flits from one to the other,
flashing red against the white on white,
a bit of warm living blood
doggedly enduring through the biting chill.

I listen,
and I hear the breathing of the Giant.