Classic Poem

From where she lay she could see the snow crossing the darkness slowly,
thick about the arc-lights like moths in summer.

She could just move her head. She had been lying so for months.
Her son was growing tall and broad-shouldered, his face becoming like that of her father,
dead now for years.

She lay under the bed-clothes as if she, too, were covered with snow,
calm, facing the blackness of night,
through which the snow fell in the crowded movement of stars.

Dead, nailed in a box, her son was being sent to her,
through fields and cities cold and white with snow.