We’re outside at dark and witness
snow brightening under a cone of parking lot light.
My daughter claims all of the flakes
look like stars falling.

Here they are on the ground, on our boots,
in our hair—I tell her—thousands
more wishes to be made. She gathers as many as she can
in her tiny hand. The tighter I hold, she says, the more they disappear.

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Translated from the Irish by the author.