At the rim of winter,
walking to the hawthorn grove
where branches hold their red jewels.
The Good Neighbors favor this place,
the low hill where frost hovers
before the sun bestows its heat.

Tonight the air feels split,
as if two climates rub against one another:
the cold of the North, biting enough to break bone,
and a warmth carried on a foreign wind
that smells of myrrh
and the first hour before dawn.

Nicnevin’s storm gathers early.
Hearing ghost-horses shuddering in the distance
as if the sky were a great door
she raps with a knuckle of ice.
The Queen of the Winter Host
rides where the living forget to watch.
I’ve felt her pass before:
a pressure in the lungs,
a thinning of the world’s crust.

Tonight another presence walks the boundary.

A feeling lifts from the lowest branch
of the hawthorn.
It quivers like heat above desert stone
and then resolves into a form
that barely touches the ground.

A peri.
Brightness shaped into a woman’s outline,
her cloak woven from the color
of sunrise trapped inside crystal.
Her wings fold and unfold with the slow grace
of roses opening under the lake.

She looks at the hawthorn first,
as though greeting an old friend
in an unfamiliar country.
Then her gaze turns toward the northern dark
where Nicnevin’s host move with intent.

When she finally speaks,
her voice is the feeling of a lantern
being lit inside me.

I have crossed a long way
to see how your people honor the turning.

Her presence carries no threat,
yet the grove reacts.
Branches bristle.
Air vibrates like harp strings.
It’s rare for any of the Good Neighbors
to tolerate a stranger,
much less one born of a land
where holy fire burns without smoke.

The Solstice makes strange neighbors.

A gust splits the clouds.
The Winter Queen arrives in the wind’s hollow,
a vast, feminine shape
formed from storm and shadow,
her hair blowing like black banners
caught on antlers of ice.
No face, only an impression:
the chill that crawls up your spine
when you stand in a doorway
you realize is not empty.

The peri lifts her chin.
Light meets storm.
Warmth meets cold.
Two Queens on neutral soil,
and I, a mortal, standing foolishly
between their breaths.

Nicnevin’s presence presses into my bones,
reducing thought to a single primal note:
Survive.
The peri answers with radiance
that softens the fear
without banishing its necessity.

I understand nothing,
yet meaning pours into me like meltwater:
the Queens are bookends of a story
older than the languages
that shape their names.

One keeps the gates of night.
The other guards the threshold of dawn.

On this longest turning, their realms brush like wings passing.

The grove holds its breath
while the peri bows her head,
then rises, brilliance folding round her
like a cloak gathered for travel.

Nicnevin’s storm-form drifts backward,
weightless as ash.
The wind stills.
The pressure in my chest releases
like a clasp undone.

Both Queens recede,
stepping into layers of the world
I cannot follow.

Hawthorn branches settle.
Night becomes night again.

I stand alone under the solstice sky,
changed in ways the body will understand
long before the mind catches up.
The air holds two scents,
juniper frost and desert dawn,
intertwined for a moment
that will never come again.

I know, without being taught,
that the turning of the year
is a crossroads where great powers
pause just long enough
to acknowledge each other,
and where mortals sometimes witness
what the earth prefers to keep secret.

[Jane McCarthy is a Ghostwriter and Poet. She’s received a Silver Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future Contest, and is a Pushcart Prize Nominee. Jane has been published by The Fairy Tale Magazine, Havok, Humour Me, Spillwords, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Quarter Press, Illumen, Eye to the Telescope, Novellum, Manawaker Studio, Sublimation, Farmer-ish, The Underland Review, and The Lindenwood Review. Find her here: medium.com/@janemccarthydna ]