Winter’s Truths by Myrne Roe

Windows closed to snow

revealed a fox curled on pale ground,

full tail draped around,

pointed nose resting on paws

and brazen jet eyes staring at me.

 

He stretched and stood, loped away

to search, I’d guess, for a rodent

munching on grain spilled in the barn,

a rabbit blending with a snow knoll,

or an old hen near scrub oaks

pecking dense ice in a water bowl.

 

Tea and a down comforter

divorced me from the view

to consider swirling winds that dispense

chance between weak and strong.

Did not Nature devise

forever discord between the two?

For the sake of peace, I’d choose

equality which, I know, is as unlikely

as the old hen breaking the ice.

 

The fox has left, his dinner surely done,

my fitful musings of justice over,

I slowly succumb to a winter doze.

I hope, as my breath slows,

the fox’s meal was a larcenous rat.

~ Myrne Roe

Bio: I am a retired editorial writer and syndicated columnist who has been writing poetry for fifteen years. My poems have been published in local and regional publications including ByLine Magazine, Voices of the Heartland, Words Out of the Flatlands and Kansas Voices. I have also published a chapbook, Ironing Out the Wrinkles

myrne@cox.net

Guest editor Eric McHenry’s new book of poems, Odd Evening, will be published by Waywiser Press in 2016. His previous collections include Potscrubber Lullabies, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2007, and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a children’s book illustrated by Nicholas Garland. He also edited and introduced Peggy of the Flint Hills, a memoir by Zula Bennington Greene. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Field, Orion, The Guardian (U.K.), Poetry Daily and Poetry Northwest, from whom he received the 2010 Theodore Roethke Prize. Since 2001, he has been a poetry critic for The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and two children and teaches creative writing at Washburn University.

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