“Winter Into Spring”

 

(Watercolor, “Salisbury Downs”  Jane Kohut-Bartels, 2005)

(A detour from “Tin Hinan” because today feels like the poem)

 

WINTER INTO SPRING

Mysterious, unfathomable, muted season,
where life and reason are suspended
upon a cold metal wire.
The wind a razor of clipper glass
sailing through glassine air
slicing the pallid sun’s rays–
an attempt to warm a frigid earth
to a remembered fertility.

Solemn seasonal palette,
white, gray, black,
cut with a flash of blood-red–
Kamikaze cardinal!
like the demon wind bearing its name,
dares the thin and paling air
to brighten for a flashing moment–
A witness to recurring life.

Season of bountiful snow,
brings a thirst 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 day, a pale day
a southern breeze
breaks through the bonds of Winter
brushes up, slides up
upon the 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,
and then the ice dam down in the brook
cracks with a louder sound
and the rush to Spring
is heralded with these natural sounds.

A blind movement
felt deep in the soil-
a careful stirring,
barely a rumble in the gut of Earth
as birth beneath replaces death above
pushing through the Great Womb
to a pallid sun above.

The tyranny of Winter is broken.

Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2018