January at Five in the Afternoon by James Owens

January at Five in the Afternoon

Sun on snow a shine
too bright to look at:
blindness, migraine,
glister of frostbite,

all day as if alive
inside the mind
of a child
thinking of white.

Now, as evening lowers
over these fields of snow
that earlier fired and froze
with an unnuanced purity,

we find a grainy, scumbled grayness
rising in them, somehow kind,
which is sleep growing heavy
in the child, her own and the sky’s.

by James Owens

Editor’s Note: The imagery in this poem is startling and true.

Photo by Christine Klocek-Lim