This was a poem I made several months ago for a project in school.


Norway spruces to the slim white steeple,
The banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero.
Between the winter landscape about us and to my surprise,
We dropped back into our usual silence.

I became aware in the dusk that he had turned his face to mine.
I waited a moment for an answer that did not come,
But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night,
And the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind.

The village lay under two feet of snow,
And the moon had set,
But the night was so transparent 
That the white house-fronts between the elms 
Looked grey against the snow.

The night was perfectly still,
The hush of midnight lay on the village.
Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood,
It seemed to be seething in a mist of heat.

As he stood in the darkness outside the church
The sound of her voice had startled him.
All his life was lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver.

They walked on in silence through the blackness
And into the comparative clearness of the fields,
While the open country rolled away before them,
Grey and lonely under the stars.


© Hannah McGavran