Harriet Dark

Snow crunches underfoot like the tiny

bones of birds;

Bones that are crushed by the weight

of a thousand dreams of freedom.

Flying into horizon’s burn. We bask in

the heady afterglow.

The muses call and drown us in avarice

and vice; we are baptised in the flood.

The delicate tinklings of the homeland

songs cascade

from the tiny holes that poke through the

blackness of the ruptured heartbeat.

We can’t escape the reckoning in the end.