From the archives — 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

from Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, January 13, 2018

Photo by Christine Klocek-Lim