Waystation – a poem by Kyle Laws

Waystation
—after a photograph by Barbara Jabaily

Sun burns a cross into the frozen lake
century old bristlecone pines circling round
as audience to those who left prints in the snow.

The sun did this, not as it rose but as it set into
Wet Mountains in the Sangre de Cristo Range.
I look at it over and over because it feels a rise

as if there is a tomb tucked into the limestone cliffs
and the irregular circle at the base is where people
stopped to pray at a waystation to the other side.

This is before the melt, when what was underneath
was solid, when all you’d known since birth held
its stance, when even if you hurt, you were loved.

Still, this is where you ventured, the base of mountains
where everything becomes symbolic, even the melting
of a winter lake outside the season of Lent.

Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.