Regrets

Winter has perhaps, run too long,
been too bitter. It’s cold too harsh,
leaving broken limbs scattered across the landscape,
beautiful corpses covered in killing ice,
broken from the burden of snow too heavy to bear.

There will be a spring. Of that there is no doubt.
God is too regular in his habits
for it to be otherwise. The ground will show itself.
Color will return. There will be flowers and rich greens
of new life on broken limbs. You will stand in the warmth.

But the tree will always be scarred. The broken limbs
will lie about, waiting to be put away, or built into a funeral pyre.
There will be beauty, but a different kind of beauty,
less perfect, and somehow stronger,
and only you will remember this winter,
the season of unbearable cold,
nearly murderous,
but not quite.

About this poem

I was sleeping fine. And then I wasn’t – this poem was in my head. Nothing doing till I got it out.

Now maybe I can get to sleep.

The picture of from my home in Virginia. The tree is a corkscrew willow, the most magical, fragile, broken tree I have ever known.

Tom