Winter Scene

(Note: Though this poem was written in 2001, amazingly it turns out to have been written the same date as tonight, January 7, during one of the coldest Polar Vortex chill blasts I’ve experienced, and certainly the coldest in many years in Philadelphia. With prayers for the indigent and God’s warmth on them…)

Cold winter night blue snow crust on the ground
colors bleached out to only a few from the usual spectrum

even multicolored things in black and white now
palladiums of xylophone ice cabinets in a near dimension suspended

just above ground level played on by angels using
devilish mallets to make long low echoing plongs of sound

reverberate among skeletal trees housing the few birds
left in their snow coats trying to snooze heads deeply

buried in wing-pits like tight
feather balls for a sport frozen in space the pitch

suddenly stopped in midair until spring thaw
when all will float freely in space again against

flittering green backdrops and uncoiling scarlet splashes and
a soft golden ubiquitous light even in the middle of the night

it seems with earth’s blood flow pulsing so
youthfully again through the vision screen

and everything again like a golden
ocean in motion with all its leaping arcs and arches

not like the
present suspended animation of the silvery ice-world held in the

center of planetary star-space like a single round teardrop frozen on its
sad descent to nowhere from no particular

origination to no clear destination but dear God’s good
pleasure through all His various weathers rapidly

shifting from hot to cold and
back again in our

hearts

---

1/7/2001 (from Blood Songs)

Categories: Poems