Yuki-Musume (The Daughter of the Snow)

Candlelit hearth
splays quivering shadows
across the room -

He writes in his diary
a final time;
silent as the quiet in
a deathly tomb
save for the gale whistling
through the key hole,

fingertips numbed by
the cold, he sighs hot breath
into the air - as the wind
outside blisters stronger
and wilder,

a murmur

“she’s here;

she’s here at last.”

For his heart was the only
thing that burned with warmth
that night;

as if the storm had waned
in but a second,
a knock,
another.

All the candles snuffed,
and his hands began to
tremble, though he had
become accustomed to the
cold -

a woman,
eyes, vapid, azure lagoons,
and skin, white as fallen
snow.

A woman, for
whose beauty exists no
words, no colour.

“Can I stay a while?”

Her meagre plea,
as the man dropped to
his knees...

“You may...”

and but inches away from
her naked feet,

“May I...?”

An unsatiable need to
press his lips to her ankles,
and an unquenched
thirst to end these
nights alone,

he kisses her,
his lips effusing
with deathly blue.

—

In a whir of white frost,
she left the man
motionless upon
the porch.

Away, into the mountains
where she had too,
once leapt into the
cavernous, gelid
jaws of death.

—

Inspired by Yuki-Onna, a woman who takes on the form of a snowstorm, existing in Japanese folklore as a killer of lonely men, taker of vitality, sometimes even taking and killing children. At times, stories of Yuki-Onna have depicted her as not an evil spirit, but even a humane one, that can show mercy. There are many variations, some saying she was born of snow, others cite she is a ghost a woman who died in the mountains.