Anna In Autumn - Barbara Meier

There are snowmen hands-on trees and leaves hang by nails.
Autumn blue foretells a winter sky. It is the quiet without the storm.
The spring green of plastic turf recalls the ghosts of summer.

I can almost hear the muffled thuds...the silence is a kind of death.

Winter lies on the horizon, anticipating 13 degrees;
snow on the valley floor.
The wind died among fallen leaves,
hushing traffic on the freeway.

Into the silence...I hear the wing, the feather,
of brown girl, flicker between the cross of branches.
She shimmers, hovers in late afternoon light.

The beating wings, pumping heart
the substance of life in winter.
Winter possesses death in the drift of lavender composting gray.

Life is hidden.
Life behind beetle bark and spider silk,
hawking the living out of mid-air.

I ponder Anna in Autumn and hypostasis union.
Life stalled in migration. Life lived without apparent sustenance.
In, with, and under the water, blood, and bread.
The Divine and the Mundane in a tiny brown body.

Originally published by The Green Silk Journal, 2016

Barbara A Meier is a writer living in Lincoln, KS. She has been published in The Poeming Pigeon, Pure Slush, Metonym, Young Ravens Literary Review, and The Bangor Literary Journal. She has three chapbooks published: “Wildfire LAL 6”, from Ghost City Press, “Getting Through Gold Beach”, from Writing Knights Press, and  “Sylvan Grove”, from The Poetry Box. She loves all things ancient. She works in a second-grade classroom and in her free time she likes to drive the dirt roads around Lincoln.