A deadly car crash revealed something awful
Poet and artist Frieda Hughes reflects on a horrific accident shortly before the snow came and wiped a false layer of forgetting over everything...
Saturday, before the snow came,
Two men named like brothers from another country
Drag-raced the roads I call home, drug-driving
Their uninsured blue and red into a white Toyota.
The driver was dead as they drove off in tandem
To save themselves the trouble of arrest.
A back-seat child was air-lifted from its parent.
Caught now, I wonder if karma is just an invention,
Or if their lives will erode as retribution
Works its way into the layers of their clothing,
Their bedding, their skin. And then the snow fell,
Deadening sound and stalling traffic,
Closing schools and heaping upon car roofs
Until they vanished beneath the piling loaves of powdered water.
The temperature tightened, taps flooded the cellar
And I closed the door on it. My huskies duck into the snow,
Pushing their snouts forward through the crystals of ice
That blast back the reflection of sun like mirror splinters.
Morse code from the fractured facets is whitely blinding,
Reminding me of the magic of small things, multiplied.