The Frost Queen Passes by Diane Jackman

Frost on the spider’s web,

stretched between oaks,

marks each loop and lace

in morning mist.

The path winds down

away into the brooding trees

where shapes and shadows

gather, beckoning.

Voices keening drift

in the silver air

to the left, to the right.

But when she turns her head,

They fade into mocking laughter.

Tinkling glass fragments

shimmer into her mind.

No one is there.

Diane Jackman’s poetry has appeared in The Rialto, snakeskin, optimum, Elbow Room, Spillway, small press anthologies, and won several competitions.  Her childhood was spent on a farm in the English Midlands where the fields were enclosed by the ruined stone walls of a burnt-out seventeenth-century Dower House.  It has had an effect on her work.