Two Poems by Susan Dale

A Fierce Winter Night

The wind roars with polar bear breath

And cuts with silver rapiers

Hoof beats thunder

Across the mountain of night

Shuddering atop the pole

A flag wildly furls
Unfurls
Wind swoops down the chimney
And shouts imprecations to the fire
In the stove___
blazing
to greedily gobble up logs, cringing

In the basement the sub pump

Gurgles and swallows

Scratching at the windows,

Steel nails of sleets’ white-bone fingers

Ah, we shiver inside, for we know

we are held hostage
by the blinding white wrath
of a fierce winter night

December

December ringing in high wild notes

Winter nailed to the earth
Its leaden jaw set until April
Mornings whittled thin
Under a frosty halo sun

Days drip with snow blossoms

Float in twilight clouds

Faint and pink as infant dreams
Shivering in the wind

Winds flare from winter’ nostrils

Bringing in the knobby knees
Of bone-cold nights
With secretive stars

A slivered, thin-promise moon

Lifts above truth
Rises beyond time

Susan Dale’s poems and fiction are on Eastown Fiction, Ken *Again, Penman Review, Inner Art Journal, Feathered Flounder, and Hurricane Press. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.