January: In Verse

It is easy to protest that the days are longer
as, the great milestone of Solstice past,
we wait for the snowdrop's bowing advent
and the baroque ruff of aconites.

But as we gaze across the winter's sky-breadth
searching paler kinds of ashen grey,
and await knotted fronts that bring us
boreal temperatures, rain, perhaps hail;
and see western winds that shatter the branches,
batter the tree trunks, and struggle like an opposing army
through each space and refuge of the house,
and pillage the coalstove's heat whole,
roaring rudely through the chimney stacks;
— then, as we see the rushing clouds' despair
in the lonely levels up the troposphere —
then facts are misted by skeptics' fears.

Yule's warmth from December has left,
and the Star of Bethlehem arced beneath
the far edge of this hemisphere
— no more to brighten the world with an Epiphany.
Now an early Lent spreads austere unity
to a dark and weak parade of weeks.