Snow

Once upon a time during a long, dark, cold winter, a tired old woman was walking home. The road was long, and leaving behind the busy life of the town, she came to the edgelands. Here, the smaller houses huddled together to keep warm. There were no carefully tended gardens to soften their damaged and brittle edges, just tangled hedges, and skeleton fingers of thorn trees scratching the air and tapping on shuttered windows. 

As she walked, it started to snow. It was approaching dusk and the soft rain which had drizzled all day was turning to light snowflakes. They drifted hesitantly at first, as if they wondered at the twist of fate their lives were taking, and then committed to their beautiful frozen forms.

The snow settled immediately, assuming its rightful place in the earthly world. It wrapped around the shabby houses like a white fur coat, and they wriggled and luxuriated in it. It seemed to belong to them, it soothed them, healed their hurts and made them feel alive again. The houses swayed towards each other, as the snow danced around them, swirling and whirling. Flakes turned into flurries, into sweeping drifts. Across the pale yellow-grey sky the snow started to spiral, spun into a wild tarantella. 

The edgelands grew wilder as the old woman carried on walking, and the houses were left behind. Wheeling snow covered everything, and transformed brittle, gnarled tree branches into soft dreamy limbs that reached towards the sky.

She stopped still, hypnotised. The world was full of snow, and time stood still. 





A biting chill creeps into the gaps between her clothing. She hasn’t noticed the cold until now, and starts to shiver, just a little at first, now shaking until her bones seem to rattle and her flesh seems to disappear.

She is caught in the patterns of the snowflakes, like a fly in a spider web, tiny icy lines, weaving and dancing all around her head. She looks down, she can’t see her feet anymore. The snow is above her knees already and she can’t move her legs.

The biting cold is now subsiding, and pins and needles burst all over, biting points of heat, like hot stars of pain, and these stars of pain are the snowflakes, stabs of ice in the air. 

Shapes emerge from the whirling snow. She reaches out her hand, and takes her glove off, she starts to pull feathers from the sky with icy fingers, one by one, delicate pure white feathers, each one softer than the next. They circle her head, nestling into her hair.

The snow still tumbles to the ground in vast swathes, and it knows now that this time, it won’t melt away as if it had never been, this time it will live forever, covering up ugliness and subduing pain.

Tears freeze on her eyelashes and she keeps pulling feathers from the sky, now they are coming quite freely, and start to take the shape of huge white wings, which surround her, and somewhere in the air is a warm heart that beats strongly as her finite, earth-bound human heart weakens, and the heaviness and white-hot stars of pain all over her body start to dissolve into the solace and steadiness of the giant heart beat that lives between those two beautiful wings. 

Her arms now start to grow feathers, strong quills at their centre, firmly anchored into her goosebump skin. 



		           She is light as a feather…


								She is light as a snowflake

		pinned to solace and

			bound to the earth 		
						
								beautiful quills tumble	


into an anchor of tiny flesh behind the world

						vast ugliness clothed by hands that drift and clutch in earth

the warmth of the first places, 
		
			pure, subdued and heavy.



firmly anchored feathers wheel towards…


			“bones rattle
			flesh disappears
			biting cold
			pull feathers earthbound”



caught around her head, 

								spun soft dreamy limbs



		solace at the centre

				  icy fingers live forever

the shape of huge earthbound eyes

			and hesitant ugliness.

							heat behind busy whirling life



	
	huge white pure-spun wings