Winterspell Fifty winters are gone and tonight a pink and peaceful sky shrouds our white sleeping city, a train rumbles by and brings to life on the window ledge a transmitter, my father's, now mine, all his years a telegrapher who knew the news that was for others, the gamblers and their bets, the down-on-their-luck needing money, the War Department's telegrams. A code, and with the softest touch, he passed the messages along. Words come in this winter night, for me at fifty and from father, the very last he was to speak, one sentence that was sent to us, his only manuscript, I'm not going to quarrel, he quietly said, with God. Reprinted with permission from Whole Notes, Copyright © 1991 by Anita Norman

NATURE by Anita Norman

Uninterrupted the telling, how fledglings in the soft morning mystically tuned sail off from the cliff to the open blue water, and some fall to foxes or too close to shore where sea gulls catch them. Daylight stretches and ends along the horizon, the sun has fallen and I have placed in the window a scrap of paper, a sign for the children to come home. Reprinted with permission from South Dakota Review Copyright © 1988 by Anita Norman

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