Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.
Ash Wednesday
All day
endless wind howls, screeches at clasped
windows, birds hurled like liquored fruit across the hard white
world, trying to hold what’s solid and earthy while
around them the watchers watch, both threatening and removed.
It’s a day of ashes, of the scant and pale remains, what was
tenebrous, leafy and dark, now burnt crisp and cold,
scattered and swirling under the living bones stripped
of green, skeletonised and taut, unmoved,
holding place for what’s fleshy, what’s being born,
what’s scrabbling and clawing like the howling
wind, calling forth the time to come, an incantation
for the cycling and recycling of all that’s died
and all that’s yet to die, borne in soil and on the
ceaseless currents, keening like the solar wind,
all the breathless day
©M Wms 2024
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