Mud Season
Still cradled in snow, the dreaming
land puddles awake. Last summer,
she scattered her husband’s ashes
in the forest just before wildfires
seared through. Now she walks it
alone— the rock faces of mountains
untouched by time in the graying
decades they hiked here together.
A woman’s body is birth and rebirth,
she thinks, feeling no sadness
about being gone before the forest
grows back. Already, mule deer graze
on a windfall of grass. Moving
through scorched aspen and spruce,
she finds clusters of pasqueflowers.
The earth mothers us even as we sink
into her mud. These are the holes
our bodies leave. This is how
we move forward, slogging through
loss, tracking it into our lives.
©2021 by Lew Forester
first published in Atlanta Review
