KILLING FROST

        She felt the moon.  She felt the magic—both calling to her then.  

        A change on the wind, cool blow from the north.  There would be a killing frost; ice crystals’ suspend in air and sky forming halo around full moon, bright aurora around form, hinter-edged in prism light, kaleidoscopic in the sky.

        Coyotes’ howl, still after-silence as the killing frost set in; cold arrival of the north.

        Fire in hearth, pop and crackle of splitting wood, grained splinters curled in consuming of the flame; its light on the stone, its cast into room; warmed and safe from the killing frost as wild and magic played in the full moon sky.

        She saw it all in vision—felt it in her bones; knowing of a way, archaic and old, never fully lost by those with magic in their blood and sacred-wild as their roots.

        Moon and magic called.