Winter Garden

The weather has turned cold
and hard frost has killed the garden.
The season has changed,
the flowers that once danced brightly
stand like dead soldiers, trembling in the wind.

Perhaps you should mow them down
and turn them over in the rich black dirt underneath
but you do not.

They have a beauty of their own, these naked stalks,
each like and brown crusts of flowers that once were
remind you of colors past and colors promised

And so you leave them,
and stand in the winter garden
a trembling soldier yourself,
not yet dead
despite the appearance.

About this poem

I was with my father in the hospital yesterday (He is stable, and in no immediate danger), and his gray fragility reminded me of winter gardens. But even in this last phase of his life, now and then things he says and does, remind me of who he was and what he was. Like a winter garden. Like sometimes, our own lives.

Tom