To Travel Free
A Golden Shovel Poem
by Mary Langer Thompson

“Bone-Pale, the recent snow fastens like fur to the river.”
from Early December in Croton-on-Hudson, by Louise Glück

When the stars seem bone-pale
and the moon is waning, the
moon that shone in the recent
past so brightly on even cold snow,

it’s then that your doubt fastens
to faith and it seems like
hope falls from your shoulders like a slippery fur
shawl, and you want to go to

see what another country would do to the
people who travel free like Huck Finn on his river.



 

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