Winter Wandering of Feet and Mind

Across the frozen field of brittle plume

Raw, ragged mumbles grumble, tumble cold

They wander through earth’s barren living-room

Like wastrels searching for their squandered gold

Bronze shroud of milkweed shivers, robbed of silk

Flung fecklessly in autumn wantonness  

Now sunlight, pale as sallow honeyed milk

Spills impotently on winter’s duress

While we, trespassers on its powdered hush

Caught in the vortex of longing and love

Pause on the fringe of muted underbrush

To drink the echoes trickling from above

Of green leaf sigh and murmured melodies

Borne in the bantering of summer’s breeze

***

The fallow, in its brief sabbatical

Inspires farmers; his anxieties  

Don eager dreams; his passion virginal

Despite its annual perplexities

And as the wind sashays and pirouettes

Across the still and stricken country-side

Where furrows sleep beneath the silhouettes

Of evergreen against the eventide

And as the farmer nods beside the hearth

Of flick’ring flame while blizzards deck the fir

Somewhere within his chest as in the earth

The nucleus of spring begins to stir

Beneath life’s disappointment and its doubt

Tender belief and hope begins to sprout

***

The woodland does not cast judgment on us

Or render its assumptions as full proof

Of our ineptness; here kind moments pause

As we bow beneath limb and snow-scrim roof

To worship without barriers of time

Or the distraction of man’s shallow ploy

Woodlot cathedral, sacred and sublime

We praise its Maker with unguarded joy

The hour of strife’s turmoil will subside

We battle its forces beneath, above

Though gods of self are never satisfied

Our One True God simply desires our love

Here on the palm of argent hinterland

I hear Him whisper in the winter-land

© Janet Martin

Yesterday's wide open afternoon was the perfect canvas for thinking and skiing as far and fast or slow as the heart desired:) It seemed like even the wind was taking a sabbatical; all was calm and still...the calm before freezing-rain-storm.