The Snowboy
No.
What to make
of what’s becoming
nothing more than a mound of snow?
The one where he takes a thick grief
from its hook, and wears it
out to step into
a freezer, and the glow
singes his eyes. For hours
the sky wavers over blues, to rest
back on a transitory red,
like blood a mother could not but have shed.
Which repeats on you. Where
coals that lent sight, a smile
and buttons have been removed
by the fingernail wind,
hands fanned,
still scraping blades against the barn. Where
the one
we conceived on Christmas Eve
pools,
swaddles grass, clear as glass
through which we might
even have seen ourselves.
*Mark Burnhope has a BTh from London School of Theology and a Creative Writing MA from Brunel University. He has poems in Magma, nthposition, Other Lives, and forthcoming in Horizon Review. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset.
