Snowlight

(and here we are, alone in the woods, looking)

(watercolor and pastel, L.Cohen)

The Poem:

Snowlight lead the way
On this path I know by day
Finding the night where it lay
Soft crunch under my feet
Ghostly shadows entreat
Go where it ends
Meeting my oldest friend

The sun just starting to rise
Through a cloudy sky
As I slowly open my eyes
It’s all around me here
These things that I fear
Whispers in the wind
Confront my only sin

So I make way
To have a say
And if I sit very still
I hear the lonesome trill
The mourning bird song
Telling me I belong
To this haunted wood
That has always stood

Here deep in the pine
I feel the slowing of time
Slowing my heartbeat
And my wandering feet
In the stillness there
If I listen I might hear

My name?
Can you remember my name?
Is it still the same?
The one I always claim.

A poem from The Woods


Here is a video reading of the poem without singing if you don't want to listen to a four minute song. Aren't my woods lovely too?

---

Somehow it is appropriate that I’m publishing this on substack when we are digging out from a blizzard. This winter won’t quit. It is the second storm in two weeks that has dumped over a foot of snow. I lost count of how much. The above video was filmed during the first storm which was not a blizzard.

This is one of those poems that somehow turned itself into a song. I do not understand the alchemy by which that happens. It just happens. I also read a bit of Rumi underneath the singing, a random passage from Coleman Bark’s translation available in The Big Red Book. And there are birds.

This poem is the turning point of the chapbook.

Why am I watching these woods?

This version of the answer is to remember my name, to find myself.

There are many answers to this question though.