(untitled - a poem)

Words hang in the crisp air, abandoned by their previous owners,
The skeletons of the wintering trees hang back, leafless limbs held up in silent shock.
The pre-dawn field's snow is unbroken and pristine
Except for the two sets of footprints in
and the one set of footprints out,
And the tentative tracks of a winter-thin deer.

She sat propped against the trunk of an elder birch,
eyes gazing north in apathetic disinterest.
Her left arm crooked around the blanket in her lap,
Her right hand clutching the crumpled page,
sodden from the landing snow.
A Dear Jane letter, we postulate as the paper edge whimpers in a passing breeze.

She is young, was young, and the shivering night has made her
a shade of blue unknown to the palette of mankind's skintone brush.
Mascara has bled into each crease around her eyelids,
Raccoon eyes rimed with frozen tears.
She wept, we can tell, before she died, though
no bruise mars the youthful blue of her neck or bare arms.

A few paces away south, Jackson finds clues -
Her name is Dora, was Dora, per the soggy envelope in the muddy-snowy thistles,
And beneath her thumb, inverted ink spells the sender's name as Robe..
We speculate the RT as Jackson trudges back from the marshy creek edges
Bearing a thin blue jacket and a crumpled pair of sodden gloves.
The gloves would fit the tiny blue hand before us.

A radio squawks from the distant county line roadbed; we turn toward it
As we stare back toward the elder birch in unspeakable sorrow,
and await the ambulance which need not hurry.
The town is small - she is one of our own - one of the children full of promise, as all children are.
Her death, a rift, will be a gaping hole in our smalltown continuity of life.
Her auburn hair riffles in a passing breeze, and -

The blanket gives a kick and an angry squall!
A fire of hope is sparked in each of us, and we stumble over our feet
To make it back to her side through the snow covered tall grasses.
An infant, shivering and irate, inhales shrill chilled breaths and exhales rage,
As we disentangle her tiny limbs from the icy folds.
Bert races to his squad car, barely touching the ground in his haste, and back with his rescue kit.

The ambulance, frantically radioed, now races up the county line road,
Crime scene be damned, a dozen snow boots trample the dead wheat stubble in a mad rush.
We name her Hope, and Becky and Jackson's wife Jan squabble over who houses her first.
Jan wins, but Becky is across the street and at the side of the loaned crib each day for hours.
Neither Dora's folks, long gone from our small town, nor Robe-RT step up.
We bury her out by St. Thomas' and all of us at the firehouse chip in for a small granite stone.