Inclemency

We all survived the day when the world didn’t end
with the Mayan calendar a week after Sandy Hook.

They said it was a sure thing but the thrum of
daily life filtered up like muffled heartbeats

from the cold cement, or maybe it was someone
softly strumming the gut strings of a harp.

Still the children were present, each name on a stocking,
their mothers with hearts seared from an iron of grief.

Then a neighbor tossed a dead Christmas tree
on the fire escape and sparked a blazing branch

of dry pine in the back of my mind and set it
on fire until my eyes burned.

The world didn’t end one week in winter but a
promissory note of protection was issued and is

aging, unlike the children. It hasn’t been discharged,
unlike the bullets from an assault rifle.

The coldest season in the northern hemisphere
can be snowflake beautiful or sleet storm bitter.

*

Linda Perlman Fields is a poet and Peabody-winning journalist from Milford, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sunlight Press, Front Porch Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Poetica Magazine, Two Hawks Quarterly and in anthologies.