Winter Into Spring
Mysterious, silent season,
Where life and reason are suspended
Upon a cold metal wire.
The wind– a razoring of clipper glass
Sailing through glassine air
Slicing the pallid sun’s surface–
An attempt to warm a frigid earth
To remembered fertility.
–
Solemn seasonal palette,
White, gray, black,
Cut with a flash of blood-red-
A Kamikaze cardinal!
Like the demon wind bearing its name,
Dares the thin and paling air
To brighten only a moment–
A witness to recurring life.
–
Season of bountiful snow,
Brings a thirsting to the land
Where hoar-frost leaches
Moisture with a crystallized withering-
Hands to crack, bark to shatter,
And all dries and curls about
In a perverse furnace of freeze.
–
One pale day southern breezes
Break through the bonds of Winter–
They brush, sidle up
To impervious ice
And a crack like a thump is felt in the gut,
A slow drip-drip of water
Signals the end of this harsh season,
As icicles emit a hesitant stream,
Then the ice- dam down in the brook
Explodes with a thunderous sound
And the rush to Spring
Is heralded all about.
–
A slight movement underground
Felt deep in the soil-
A careful stirring,
A rumble in the gut of the surface
As birth replaces death
Pushing through Earth’s womb
To a weak sun above–
The tyranny of Winter now broken.
–
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2011, 2012
From “White Cranes of Heaven”, 2011, Lulu.com
Tags: Hope, poetry, Winter into Spring
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