The Winter Poem

To these prairies, there is such a vastness.  The dense nights make the earth almost impossible to see, as if darkness really could penetrate the lights of heaven.  And, out here, the sky rolls and rolls, like a metropolis of stars racing for the horizon.  It’s the season before Christmas and this a hamlet for German Catholics.  For miles, the only visible light is from strands of holiday lights wrapped around trees, draped down the sides of barns and curled among the posts of fences around the pastures.  At night, somewhere in the density, those lights meet those of the stars and you’d never know where the earth stopped and heaven began.