Long night of winter
What you didn't know
was the night my father died
I ran outside to the waiting trees
cold in their winter garden
cried for mercies and sank
into the bark of a gnarled oak
spilling my grief
against its insensible shoulder
skin so rough it bruised my cheek
but its sturdiness, its blankness
was what I needed, stalwart
through a howling storms
a hibernation of sorts until I wrapped my arms
around an early marbled sky
then bound together with sunrise colors
shattered the glaze of glassed branches
so when a later morning came
I broke through tentative and green.
published in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing