Winter Landscape
She had just finished knitting
the cat when it escaped, black
fur shredded against
the driving snow. The night
was cold enough to make
a butcher shiver, hands
fingerless fitted snugly
into gloves. She grabbed
her coat but it resisted,
sleeves clinging desperately
to a hat-stand. The trail
of paw-prints was cold
and diverged in two directions
as though she had missed
a stitch. She rolled one set
into a ball and followed
the other into a forest, trees
huddled closer than their
shadows, branches stroking
beards of snow. She expected
a house, there was always
a house but no, a lake
the size of a mirror
and on the ice an empty bobbin.
The seventh son of a seventh son, Maurice Devitt was abandoned by his evil stepmother and raised in the forest by a poet.
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