She walks the empty earth tears, bitter, freeze as they fall forming shapes, strange beautiful, inimitable as a child. The first snow, baptising the earth into a new age a hard beginning a bitter winter.
The weight of her grief burdens the earth as she walks her feet crushing life beneath them. She bore a child, racked body labouring. This new pain racks her mind, a loss abortive, bitter as stillbirth, the rape of her daughter.
Snow like a blanket muffles the earth, thawing the iron hard soil, warming the girl entombed deep below blood stabbing through veins painful as birth. She forces her way from earth’s dark core, clawing ever higher
through frozen ground, limbs rigid, stiff with ice, dragged from her lover, she staggers like a ghost across snow-white wastes. Called from the dead, undead she comes, hunting her mother.
There is a woman in the moon living alone and the space around her grows vaster every day. She watches the spinning earth so far away green with life in the sun
but then she turns away and looks only at the bare rock the empty moonscape of her life and the void of endless space with no boundaries to rest her eyes.
She reaches out her arms - but then they drop and hang empty at her sides.
Miriam Hastings, author 