Winter Heart.

 

You like to see frozen trees

cloaked in crisp clung ice.

You like to tread on iron ground

sound soft in snow.

You like to see the world in white

washed by arctic winter.

 

In warm wet winter

when rain drops line the branches of trees

and hang like mirrors to the white

windowless sky. You cry 'Let there be ice!

 Drops be diamonds! Mud be snow!'

Stretched like pegged polar bear pelts across the ground.

 

Cold grows heavy in the air and rests upon the ground

and lungs are full and feel the weight of winter;

and from the sky exquisite patterns in snow,

swirl to swaddle naked trees;

and waterways are locked by crystal ice.

You love this world wrapped up cold in white.

 

This bloodless bride adorned in white.

This terrible beauty that clamps the ground

all breath of life encased in ice.

You love lands locked in the frozen fist of winter,

where susurration’s silent, stilled in streams and trees

stripped of leaves stranded in the snow.

 

On your trembling tongue soft snow

melts as you eat the long longed white.

The cold whipping breeze that rattles the trees

puffs up powder snow from the ground.

You smile and want to carry winter

with you in a Brueghel framed in ice.

 

Your breath billows the air and falls as ice,

particles pure as snow

mingle you with winter.

Wishes won and one with white

your breathing feeds frozen ground,

beneath steadfast frigid trees.

 

Where white bears stare at holes in floating ice

and a million snow falls pack glacial ground.

This tree-less land. It is here your winter heart is found.