Painted thin beneath the dawn, a steel grey world rejoices morn,
tho nothing in this moment’s play gives rise to thought that hope is born.
Slow breezes bite and fiercely gnaw at stalks of summer’s grasses, downed.
Cattails’ chorus, stiff and brash, mourning in a whispered sound.
Tattered, torn, hollow reeds of spring’s seductive blushing,
crushed beneath the ice and snow, tossed in panic’s rushing.
Horizon holds the key. No hint of warmth is brought from thee.
Blackened poplar drives a nail of hopelessness in slivers,
renouncing dawning light’s quick glimpse. The distance holds a shiver.
Ice in flows from aged snows pins here and there to earth,
beneath a solid mastic flood where none escape its scattered girth.
Bitter. Uncontained. Eternal death and grey’s disdain.
Yet notice how the dawning light paints rivulets of frosted time.
Feel the sharp awareness build a frozen poise, sublime.
How perfectly the pain’s displayed
in grass and reed whose cattails fray.
How true the starving tree defies
the threat of death, the naked cries
of hungry ice in winter’s hand
tossed by driven wind’s demand.
How every frozen rivulet sustained in waves upon the ground,
stretches sensual, luxurious, across the patchy earth it drowns.
In supplication, mourning songs drift through the meadow’s air,
holding vigil, holding patience, while whispering a prayer.
The ghosts of summer haunt here, captured and betrayed,
to paint this lea horrifically, requited here in death, displayed.
Oh! Sorrow in this languid sight
that draws the bitter morn from night,
for winter’s step has just begun,
much more of what is here will come.
Spring, the hope and harbinger of dreams in softened virile soil,
yet only clings in beauty’s mask within this season’s toil.
Yet hope remains in hopelessness, when death and sleeping cast their play,
for time is what will take them past the frozen grace that runs this day.
jaybluepoems 