Blood on snow: Elegy for lost moments

{Another archive from 2019; very slightly polished, but practically untouched}

Hold on…let go

Hold on…let go

I know—I know how the rhythm goes:

Hold on to hope…let go control—

Let go like falling snow.

Yet control is intrinsic

to this ebb and flow—

The mantra belies its paradox:

How to clutch on to hope,

a rope with barbed coat,

leading down a mythic road?

Look at my palms:

raw with rope-burn,

the skin grated, peeled—

Finger-pulps burst! bleeding

pearls, splattering

bitter-iron crimson

on fresh, milky snow.

The train has left, and still it leaves.

Snowflakes—slain—dissolve

from hexagon into

wallows of sullied mire.

How do we fossilise a moment

without tarnish?

Without muddying memory

in retrospective varnish—

without rebuilding stories

with substitute bricks?

Even as the gale ebbs away,

it lingers in our pores,

transfiguring the chemistry

of bone.

Though the sun buries its face,

our cheeks stay ruddy with warmth.

Life becomes death becomes life—

the inevitable beauty

of a thawing dawn.