The Winter Solstice Girl

The hinterland of winter

births snowfields veiled in sea foam:

stark as a petrified palm,

searing as splintered bone,

bearing scars etched

by forgotten gods.

Its harshness compels

even the gentlest—

hares, squirrels, shrews—

to devour their young:

wilting, writhing,

still warmly pulsing

in the permafrost.

Is this savagery,

or misunderstood mercy?

A flaxen-haired girl,

stranded in this glacial hush,

crouches shivering

in a warren hollowed like a tomb.

Her lips, cracked:

ancient papyrus.

Her breath—a fugitive mist

escaping in tiny gasps.

Her shadow casts an omen

beneath the spectral moon’s eye.

Emerging from the den,

she inches toward a battle tank—

her gaze fixed on

its ingot barrel.

She uncurls her ghost-pale fist,

skin trembling,

and offers

a blood-red rose:

fresh, raw, tender.

She has never known

love’s warmth,

only the frost of worship.

Fossilised into myth,

the winter solstice girl 

was given an ultimatum:

To dissolve into mist

and wander barren lands—

a rising wind to cleanse the earth—

or to fuse with the black moon, 

annihilated by shadow and gloom?

Dissolution or immolation:

binary roads cleaved

like frozen ash branches.

To be free,

She carved a third path

and burrowed into the underworld.

For that, they cursed her name:

branded her Jezebel, witch,

unholy whore.

Still, in the alpine peaks,

a halcyon bird perches

by a winterbourne.

Its beak, crimson-stained—

as if kissed by her cracked lips—

carries a single petal,

to herald the thawing dawn:

a sky veined with fire.