Winter

- The Seasons Of Grief: Chapter IV - Poem I -

A frozen hush has taken the warmth out of the land’s girth,

Cassandra hollowed out the sky between heaven and Earth

Snowdrifts swallow the footprints I leave behind like mementos I’ll retrieve,

All my past paths erased, like I was never believed 

The skeletal trees tremble and break,

Glass-limbed poltergeists wander in the empty ache

A world once ablaze with passionate embrace,

Wears a pale frost veil, covering a vacant face

The poems spill ink into the bitter night air,

It’s desolate, no stars or lanterns, only solace there

The wind cuts my wrists low and hollow,

Calling me forward, I try not to follow

Frostbite lingers where December fades,

The holidays stretch on like Christmas lights in dim-lit glades

The river has turned to stone, the wishes call from beneath,

I run across it, praying I don’t fall through the ice and meet the cold feeling of bereave

January doesn’t feel like a season, but rather a reminder of what’s lost and what’s to decay,

The animals know what I don’t; they stay forbidden until the flowers come to stay

I purchased an extra birthday cake in case no one remembers my special day,

Through a window, a single flame cuts out, a wish to be echoed through the gray

If this cold doesn’t kill me, February surely will,

The yearly second death always waits to stab me with familial thrill

This’ll smother my past, but it’ll freeze until next year,

I’ll force my hands to build something that lasts, a blank expanse of liminality, a field pointed by my frozen tears

The seeds will die beneath the shrill ground,

Until New Year’s Eve, fires light their sprouts

If I were to pick at their cloves in Spring, would I get flashbacks of what could’ve been?

Where the seasons were level and the feelings were just something I’d lend?

The prismatic atmosphere is all but dead in the permafrost of winter,

Right now, I’m clawing at the edges of an infinite void, trying to find the ends of this depression