On the Hill

On the hill, a mother is desperate to nurse babies who have gone still and silent, with milk they'll never take She knows they are not sleeping but cannot bear to leave them, so licks their tiny faces, that they might come awake She thinks if she can warm them, then Winter will not want them and Spring will find them happy and hale, and furred, and free As sorrow overwhelms her, she curls herself around them, soon dreaming in the way of all creatures such as she of fish in rippling water, of game and earth. Of watching her mate at play in powder, unmindful of the chill And when the Winter claims her, she's running with her children, grown tall among the flowers that bloom upon the hill