Poem - The Winter I Carry

The Winter I Carry

The winters taught me how the dark weeks in Scandinavia lower us into a spell—
a slow opening of the night and its breath,
the quiet drift where snow decides its landing,
and a white so deep it threatens to erase the entire black landscape —
the me-of-me, the pulse beneath my breasts.

I learned Sweden holding a frostbit lantern:
small window-stars half-drowned in blackened pines,
their amber and scent looking like a ghost caught
between retreat and rise—wild, half-sleeping,
its slow unending shadow caressing old Norse stones.

The houses keep mysteries under roofs
that slope like tired shoulders in the gloom.
No cars murmur down those buried roads—
only the long cold widening its mouth,
and sometimes me, a breath against its teeth.

I miss the iron stove that coughed up sparks,
each ember prowling toward the fur-lined rug—
as if to claim a warmer death.
I miss the siren-fog rituals of dusk,
the outlaw lanterns climbing up to the sky,
so bright their burning vanished past the stars.

The land holds an ancient skogstill hush—
the hush makes you swear the old gods move beneath the drifts,
their antlers made of the moon,
their slumber a bruise beneath the human world:
And I fed the gnomes their porridge in the snow,
though part of me believed they fed on my naivety.

And once, a little mouse climbed into my hand
upon the church steps, as though my skin were home.
I swear the air that night tasted nearly holy—
a sharp metallic note of winter’s crown.

But there was something, and I outgrew that part—
the time when friendship turned to soot,
where the silence bore into the wooden beams of our home
and left feral fingerprints under my hair—
then shadow crossed the landscape like a wound,
a wound that glittered in winter’s hand.

And still—
snow recalls every footstep made.
It keeps its bright dead record of our hours,
a tenderness I sometimes try to hate
because the cold can create illusions,
and illusions can fashion beauty of lies.

Yet, somewhere in that frost-bit solitude,
beneath the runework sky, one truth stayed warm:
the world I love is still the world I keep.
And there is someone—not the ghost of you—
who’ll walk beside me when the snows return,
who’ll keep the wild I carry without fear,
and touch the winter where my blood sleeps.

Someone will walk beside me,
through the winter I carry.

Marni Fraser
1114.2025

Marni Fraser 2025