Poem: Fall To Winter

 Fall To Winter

 

you spruce trees,

scholars profuse of stylus, 

who scrawl in wind as brute clouds scroll by,

tablets of shade,

these dark renaissances

baffle your earnest searchings.

your fountainous green inkwells,

so regal and productive, have gone 

and now you stuff the frosted blossoms

into your old, scraggly coats.

soon, with forelimbs to the ground, 

arthritic of silver fingerbone,  

you will pray, 

pray to a crown of stars stark as no nimbus,

pray while you hunch 

under jaws of ice unkind to wood or skin.

you murmur-whisper-moan--and hum, 

hum still,

within an exoskeleton of negative celsius,

your dreams a mobile of icy glazed glances,

bold and yet stoic, tinged with grizzle;

and yet you gawk, gawk still, 

at the moods of the snows,

and the way the stones, 

not so cemeterial as they might have been,

grin so deathless.

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8/14/24 mods