Friday, October 2, 2009

Winter














I can feel winter approaching.

It's a very slow and discreet thing...
but there are skeletal branches lacing
the morning sky telling the clouds a
rumor of ice and darkness.

There's something innately sad about
the death of a long summer and shorter
fall. Yet, I know that when the snow
and ice come, the earth can heal. It
slows us down and we are forced to look
inward.

Winter means something different to me
now that I have lost my childhood. It has
become a metaphor for our own mortality.

Small rewards lay inside of it though. Diamond
encrusted snow drifts in the moonlight. Deep
mountain snows that counter shade black tree
branches in glory.

Then I imagine....

Perhaps a werewolf hides deep in the wood lot
watching for it's quarry, an old man wandering
for a bit of firewood. A child pausing to catch
a snowflake on her tongue....

and in some strange way... crimson bright blood
spatter-patterning the pristine white snow becomes
timeless art giving homage to the more elemental
struggle of the ages. Raw and inevitable.

Finer things tantalize... wine, apples and venison.

So it is that we plunge headlong into it, together,
peeling away yet another year.. looking back for
memories that keep us warm and hopeful.

Outside, winter reaches it's broken and cruel fingers
deeper into the ground. The killing frost.

No birds sing in this land.

So we wait for the warmth of spring and life. Below and
beneath heavy rotting leaves stream side, an emerald
shoot bends it's young back through black soil...

a promise that life will indeed, return.

3 comments:

  1. Nice imagery in this ode to Nature, reminding me a bit of some of our American transcendalist authors. I like the structure with its carefully placed spacing. Spacing is quite important in art. Essentially, your art reveals a sentimental edge to an ordinarily mature observor of life.

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  2. Very pure and beautiful....perfect justice twords and sentiments for the approaching winters (also a month away here in India). n short, loved it!

    Kepp blogging. You have an Indian follower now :)

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  3. I think the author that unlocked the gates to writing for me, was Samuel R. Delaney. His style is somewhat prosaic, and runs parallel to my own syntax and cadence.

    Thank you. I hope you'll keep reading as I walk and spool out a thin thread behind me.

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