Hello Heidi and CP,
Thanks for taking a stab at this. I appreciate your feedback.
Maybe this helps:
Its winter – blustery and cold.
Cottonwood trees accumulated with snow and ice
look like angels
standing in a perimeter around a field.
The sun dogs also look like angels as they too ring the fields.
Wind blows the snow across the field in lines
which form like fingers stretching outward from the trees.
These finger drifts become, figuratively, sharp on their distal ends
and thus pose threat to such hypothetical souls
as may unadvisedly be out in this arctic desert
ostensibly doing penance. And if you happen
to be out here, the rawness of this
can make you feel like the penitent.
There is no answer, just silence, which
seems to gather in the cottonwoods - there are no leaves
to make noise in the wind, there is no one talking to you.
And even if you are doing penance
the angels may not be here for you this time.
Sun dogs look like fragments of rainbow
above the dead-appearing cottonwoods.
If the cottonwoods are like angels,
then the rainbow fragments can be like
what the rising soul of a dead angel may appear to be
but whether or not that be true
the dogs still gather, certain, like death.
