Three Poems

Mage-born, 

            surely
but what I saw was a little girl
dressed in white, the white
of sun-bleached bone and ash
from a too-hot flame, she sat
in the middle of the ruin, bodies
strewn around in her destruction:
a toddler
the only eye of a stumbling
hurricane. Broken crates
and grey rubble of a city
on bended knee sparked
out in a perfect circle from her
tiny form: a sculpture
I didn’t yet understand; she looked
around—her eyes as bright
as spell-fire and as grey
as the stormy sky above—and she saw me, 

her small brown arms lifting, 

her young eyes filling
with tears.

Ruins. 

Grey lonely walls, crumbling at the corners

Tiny flowers and rough grasses break up through the cracks

Once smooth white flagstone, now grey and green and splitting

From the earth’s own shifting, easing its itchy, scaly skin

The sun streaks through missing roofs, 

Slanting down

Laughter sounds. 

From the past or future or time apart from time?

Around the corner a little girl dances, twirling over the broken stone, 

She picks the small flowers in the courtyard, and ruffles the heavy air

The ruins stretch on, like a world in themselves, 

A castle, an archway, a courtyard

Lifeless

Silence. Stillness. No one walks through the doorways

Stairwells crumble into nothing: one step, two step, gone, 

Leading to places and people that can no longer be reached

And the shadows—picturesque—change only with the light

Grey and white and shadow and sun

Dust settles

Dusk. 

Lavender shadows

Snippets of song, of speech, of movement from before

There is an old smell, a heavy smell, that clings to nothing

Between the walls are spaces, between the spaces are doorways

A spell, a key, a wisp of a form

A gentle vibration

Traveller

Memory wanders

without a name, flickers

like shadows in the deep, calls

like homes never found. 

One step, two step, gone—

stairs to nowhere end; archways

that ever lead back

to the beginning. 

Phantom footsteps tread

the stone, softly, like

promises breathed to ears, kisses stolen. 

A cloak shimmers

like the veiling of the day, 

then fades, weightless, back

into the dusk.

FRANCES KOZIAR has writing published in 40+ literary magazines, and is seeking an agent for a diverse NA fantasy novel. One of her poems shortlisted for the 2019 Molotov Cocktail Shadow Award Contest, and her poetry has appeared in Acta Victoriana, Snapdragon, and Thin Air Magazine. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.