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Picture No: 10429980, Mary Evans / Hildi Reinhart Collection

Breaking Winter’s Spell
by Anne Casey
 
Did snowdrops nod their lazy heads
Cowbells clang across the miles
Milky droplets fall to earth
Spring rains soak the path beside you
Searchers calling, calling, fail
Till the snows piled high and wide
Seven children waiting, wailing
Scattered, seven paths diverged
While you lingered side by side

Marceline, the youngest nodding
Dreaming as the years piled high
High as mountains coated deeply
Pockets filled with snow and ice
Far from news of marching armies
Shifting borders, storming skies
All the world kept to its stride
While you lay in feathered billows
Still, together side by side

Marceline alone had scouted
Past the clanging cowbells swinging
Yearly, spring rains soaked her path
Now she sits snow-headed nodding
Hope as white as snowdrops blooming
Through the years had been her guide
Till the glacier slowly thawing
Gave her back her Mam and Papa
Found together side by side

 
 

© Anne Casey, First published in The Remembered Arts Journal in April 2018 and republished in An Ãit Eile in April 2018.
 
Picture No: 10429980, Mary Evans / Hildi Reinhart Collection
 

Note:

This poem was inspired by the story of a couple whose bodies were found in the Swiss Alps in 2017, 75 years after they went missing. Following their disappearance, their seven children had been separated and fostered out. Their only surviving child, Marceline – the youngest – had never given up hope of finding them. This is a poem about keeping hope alive in the midst of the storm – for all of us. The motif of the snowdrop is used throughout, as in folklore, this flower was said to break the curse of winter upon the land.
 
 

Originally from the west of Ireland and living in Sydney, Anne Casey is author of five critically acclaimed poetry collections. A journalist and legal author for 30 years, her work is widely published internationally, ranking in The Irish Times‘ Most Read. Anne has won literary awards in Ireland, Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, India and Lebanon, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and the Henry Lawson Prize 2022. She is the recipient of an Australian Government scholarship and a bursary for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney where she researches and teaches. anne-casey.com @1annecasey

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