Christmas lights strung on desert sand, climbing up stems and trunks as if growing free, blinking red green blue white.  City lights flicker in the valley seen through winter air from craggy rock peaks. Snow crystals sparkle in rainbow hues breaking sun’s light and Jamie tends his garden of gnomes, statues, green plants and love, carefully placing each treasure with a shy smile.

Winter is like this, it comes when we need it most, when a time of reflection and quiet is put upon the land.

Winter flowers share this space.  Not the robust, full bodied, summer stars but a pale semblance, mere shadows of themselves.  Spirits, filled with uncertainty,  tremulous in the slightest breeze, akin to our emotions.

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Kindness

Late summer, the woods are quiet
small creatures scurry away food
dropped obligingly from sheltering

trees

who themselves through means
unknown in an act of kindness
yield their life so another will

grow

as we do in moments often
unnoticed as a passing stranger
extends a hand to gather the

fallen

pieces, places, people so in need
a door held open, an understanding
given, a kind word now

spoken

so often left unsaid, how our kindness
to one another enriches and strengthens
giver and receiver, warmth in times of

cold

winter falls as the leaf settles wind
blown against the entrance, within
woodland life sleeps at tree base

safe

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Passing

Life and death
lie entwined in
a restless sleep
the rise and fall
of her chest in
the rise and fall
of low voices on
the soft light of
day’s end

Though silent her
presence known
and ours in reply
we gather close
these few hours
in peace one with
another seamlessly
between here and
gone

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Winter Flowers

Snowflakes swirling in lamplight
of a winter’s eve
are the swirling thoughts of
a distant time
as I pull home, a cold wind
to my face

A landscape white, bare
save those who
stand still marking the warm
summer past
a sepia image of a remembered
love

Winter flowers are poetry in
place, photographs
of a vision, phantoms hardly
seen, like hope
to the abandoned ones

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Winter is like that, it comes when we need it most.

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