The Snow Queen
By Frank Galuszka
With sympathy for light, I defended myself
under its swirling crown, and pinkly descended
through aurora into arctic air. But I diffract
where the photons continue. They go through
faceted glaciers, while forlorn, lifted by wind, I
fly to where the Snow Queen holds slaves in
grey caverns, chained; children from Europe
kidnapped at night by dark devils in sleighs,
working in secret; made to work manacled in
wind-eaten caves of ice; myself in this sorry
league until the cold took me, freezing me to
the floor of a grey cave, useless headless
handless legless boy, with Katie coming too
late, limbs in a basket and bitter tears freezing
like knives on her cheeks, while the Snow
Queen, rocking, knits frost nets to haul the life
out of southern crops. And, her quarry is
everywhere, for, from where she sits,
everywhere is south. And she sits on a rocker
made of frigidity so cold it is only a gas on a
porch put up by imp masons out of the tiny
platelets of the dead, stacked like ruby cushions and blown cold to harder gems, to red
ice. And her dress is white and crystalline. And it is she, and not some black queen, who
looks in the ice mirror, and sees Snow White's greater beauty, Snow White who abides
only a season and is gone, uncorrupted by immortality. For immortality, and the lust for
immortality, corrupts. The tears falling from the knives beneath Katie's eyes touched
only a frozen carapace, the torso of a poor boy worked to death, made to roam the
permafrost by night in winter on the black tundra, sent to gather firewood where the the
grey edge of day can be seen to the south, and where leafless brambles grow, as traps
for the souls of bad mothers, who come looking for their children too late, having looked,
too long, in mirrors themselves, and it is the very tresses they vainly admired there that
entraps them, and tangles them in the brambles. And the fathers with guns and hounds
will come too late, even for their wives, for they will only be bags of sorrow when they
are found. And their husbands will be discouraged, and weep at the border til they are
blind with ice. Only faithful sisters, travelling light and recklessly, may elude the nettles
