Marilyn Donovan – Snowy Owl

Snowy Owl

Snow   its pale tossed
blossom

            coalesced

whiteout and bare dark twigs

harvested

grown sentient

snow    as habitat

  as adjective 

bone  hook

            yet

cobweb-soft

feather-soft

snow-soft

soft and cool as cotton grass heads

cryptic

a statue

fused to a branch

sifting the pulse of the forest

its cold metallic resinous breath

face     a sounding board for silence

voice hollow as bird bones 

suddenly      detached

hinged on night

a ghost

snow-hushed

calico-pale curve

paragliding the gloom

the forest

threading

                 hemlock   redwood   lodgepole   cedar      

Marilyn Donovan is a retired librarian living in Kent. Her poems have been published in many magazines and several anthologies, including In the Telling (Cinnamon) and Bugged…Writings from Overhearings (Bell Jar). Her debut collection was A Calculus of Balance: poems after Piet Mondrian (Limpet). She has won or been placed in several competitions, including Canterbury Poet of the Year and the Wirral Festival of Firsts. ‘Snowy Owl’ was inspired by a beautiful bird seen on a trip to the Pacific North-West.

‘Snowy Owl’ won first prize in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition (April 2021), judged by Mary Anne Smith Sellen.