May 22: For My Daughter, Growing Up Too Fast, "Between Cross and Snow"

Another poem I wrote for my daughter some years ago, when I was feeling as if she was growing up a little too fast.

Little did Saint Marty know . . . 

Between Cross and Snow

by:  Martin Achatz

after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “The Cross of Snow”

How does Longfellow contain years
Of grief in fourteen lines, words
Black, unsubstantial as the upward
Lift of ash or reflections in mirrors

Of black swans at midnight?  No tears
Fall with his rhymes.  With alphabetic shards,
He combs the smoke and sear from a beard
White as whale foam.  He still hears,

After all this changeless time, her voice
Echo through sun-defying ravines
In the West, through the shadows

Between cross and snow.  In this holy space,
I find my daughter, running in evergreens,
Climbing.  Away.  Up.  Up.  To where woman grows.