“Winter into Spring”….

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