F: Cherokee Winter

Cherokee Winter

Grandmother says
she has lived since before the world
became a place of strife.
She told me she could sit,
hearing nothing as the snow fell,
not even the intake
of her own breath.
Grandmother lived
in a one room poplar cabin
in a clearing
near a forest of evergreens.
She told me: "I remember watching
through our small window
at the first hard snow of winter.
I was up so early
I couldn't tell the snow cover
from the sky. Looking outside
I saw a little yellow square
on the blue-hard frost.
It was light thrown by my oil lamp,
its little tongue rippling in the corner.
It seemed warm, and beckoning.
Exquisite, the yellow
set against so many variations of blue
just before dawn.
I wrapped myself
in an old traders blanket
and stepped outside.
To the music of the wolves in the distance,
I sat on that yellow square,
and watched the morning
turn the white to red.