Bark Soup Winter


The people cover their bones with furs
drink bark soup to tether them to life.

The fetish house in that one tree among many.
It is known I live in that house until the thaw.

Or so I believed when I chose the woman
I would return in when the great snow left us.

The soup was brewed from the bark of that one tree.
I drank it because I was a young man and easily dead.

But when I rose up with my weapons in my hands
to hunt the white death hunger out of our valley

I saw it was not as we had understood it in our minds.
I could not return.  I threw my weapons down.

© Jennifer Compton.  All Rights Reserved.