Christmas Wind by Steve Sherman

Brown Bear at Hallo Bay Tidal Flats

Christmas Wind

I sled along the windy blue and held tight

across the black -- star to tree and

not yet finding the last cabin

not yet finding the last wild

wooded cabin somewhere filed away among

the spruce and silence.

Christmas day is Christmas night

in the north country:

birch trees creak, night falls electric, the sun

a refugee to the bold white decrees of the moon:

a dark so deep only paw prints appear.

Then perhaps a vagrant chirp, a single lonely

solitary howl, a soft fall of very cold snow.

The north country has no directions

but always one last cabin,

one last slender limber of smoke in that

wilderness of Christmas hope,

one last one to bend

Those secrets among the trees!

And so it was again to that last cabin

with its climb of Christmas smoke

reached not so straight through the winter air.

Christmas is the bend in the smoke. It's always there.

STEVE SHERMAN