Category: modern society

No understanding in

how winter comes.

For it arrives uninvited

at too many times,

often when it shouldn’t,

snatching away all the covers,

driving out the flames,

or

slowly, softly,

tenderly

like a gentle, timid lover

will winter drift into days

as autumn delicately falls,

little dip by little dip, into winter’s icy arms

then a frozen world is made.

At times, making a last stand

against the coming thaw,

winter rides

with sword drawn

to wreak havoc on all things

green and growing

into spring,

stilling all hearts

feeling the flow of life begin.

At those times, winter rides

until sweated out

in the course of time.

Yet winter may freeze us solid

in the midsts of summer’s heatwaves

as we stand over the gaping mouths of graves.

As some breathe in the hope of spring,

others, being eaten by winter’s black ice

of hunger and need, stand as witnesses

to winter’s winter growing larger still:

beyond artic, beyond talk of tundra,

or whispers of permafrost—

but something too many know.

We will not end in fire

nor will we end in ice,

as Frost once wondered.

In the end,

it will be the lukewarm breeze

of indifference,

the one to do us in.