The Bedroom Upstairs
By Cróna Gallagher

Just to let you know, 
that as per tradition, frosts visit the cottage 
every new year to clear away the winter bugs 
and keep the place in order.

They thaw and freeze with muscular constriction
until all the bugs are dead on the ground and the air, 
free of sickness.  

As always, a key is kept under the mat and by the back door 
near stone steps down to the garden, you’ll come across the flock 
of sheep-hardy snowdrops droving across this cold young year 
fearless of the frost.  But pay them no mind.

With a shepherds’ staff in each hand, they’ll stoop past you
on their Turas way with faces, grave as the black faced ram 
and fixed to the ground as donkeys looking into the ditch.

Shawls of heavy ice will hang from their shoulders
like wicker creels of eelish wrack, collected from the sea pink 
gums of a long-receded shore and strapped to their pioneering 
backs, as they walk the long acre of frost-bitten grasses 

for the cosy shelter of the crippled orchard with its grove 
of bearded apple trees that wait still near the mossy gable 
and the lights now not lit, in her bedroom upstairs.