Winter Dream

Time ravishes the line, with glare of color
You fashion a sky, scarring silence
Moon hoards the light

Scars of strange
Lines fashioned into a drum
a sky of silence

Time beats the paper moon
the sky merges the day’s hoard
You fashion a paper of lines, a scrim of silence

Strange beat of days

Colors ravish the sky
Daylight hoarding moons
White merges into drum beats

You carve a place for yourself

Silence-ravished time, with a glare of strange
Moons paper the sky
a scrim of scars

Hoarding light, the line
the days beating their drum
All the colors merge into white

Time Portrait

Lines appearing, as on a woman’s face
Yes, sorrow, but much more
Need departs, the shell cracks
Strange, how beauty returns, transformed

Polished, throughout
In the silent space, lines pass, as in sorrow
The face, years of effort
Yes, need cracks

Strange, the shell departs, transformed
Throughout, the face’s dimension appears
Winding lines through beauty
the shell showing years of effort

cracking sorrow
A face shows years of need
lined in beauty
space, transformed

Ann Quinn’s chapbook Final Deployment was published by Finishing Line Press (2018), and her compilation of teaching ideas and resulting poems, Poetry is Life, is newly available from Yellow Arrow Publishing. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Broadkill Review and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ann holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University, is poetry editor for Yellow Arrow Journal, and lives in Catonsville, Maryland. Visit www.annquinn.net

Image by Kriomet, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons