Katherine Leonard
Image by Craig Tidball on Unsplash
Katherine Leonard grew up as a post-WWII Navy brat traveling to Massachusetts of John F Kennedy at the time of his assassination and the segregation of rural Texas at the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. She continued the pursuit of diverse outlooks with careers as a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. She currently lives and writes in the Central New York area and is actively involved in the YMCA’s Downtown Writers Center. Her work has been previously published in Healing Muse, Sonora Review, Writers' Café Fairy Tale Edition, Underwood Press True Chili Edition, Northern New England Review, Hole in the Head Review, Literary North and Speckled Trout Review. Her writing has been deeply influenced by time spent in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado for space and heat and Vermont and Maine for ice and clarity and by living in Washington, DC for lies and redemption.
Snow Blind
I would let you know of the song
the porcupine thrums in winter
I would tell you how the white is so bright
against the variegated gray
turning to black
How Persephone never knew cold
even as colors faded in mist
How the porcupine stills the clack of her quills
against the softness of her body, ground chilling around her
and light fading from hibernating eyes
How white is the light of winter filling crevasses
and sculpting the wind side of firs and naked maples
How the glow from that white pounds against the retina
to see mounds and spikes lying over
the frozen rivers in the moonlight
How easily forgotten that this blinding white is all done with mirrors
How could I begin to tell you in that season of white
and flattened quills
about peach and mauve and lime and ebony,
of burnt umber's orange heart
Snow blind – White blind. Words to wake you will not come
©2021 West Trade Review
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