Sky nearly white as the fields, white
as the roofs tinged with that blue
slate blue of blue spruce boughs
laden with yesterday’s snow.
How slowly my hand brings words
to this day.
How brown the wall of the barn.
How clear the rabbit’s path across the lawn.
A nuthatch proceeds both up and down the maple,
more at ease with gravity than I can ever be,
yet I believe her rounded breast and tipping beak
hold something close to teach.
I hear the music of dead men when I sing.
Who am I to fear their light clear measures?
Such force propels the hand!
Heaven claimed by words turning and falling
down the clean white page.
Heaven in the flick of a tail, heaven
in the toad’s chill sleep, the garden’s rest.
This handful of snow I hold up
to the pale persistent light.
This Light White Day was previously published in Elegant Reprieve, Still Waters Press, 1996.
A storyteller and teaching artist, and one of Bucks County’s Poet Laureates, Luray Gross has published four volumes of poetry, most recently Lift, with Ragged Sky Press. Her love of the spoken and written word began during her childhood on a dairy farm near her current home in Plumstead.
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