Month of Losses, Month of Gains

November is the spare season.

Nature’s bones show

in the ribbed rocks

and naked hardwoods.

Color blows down

as scattered leaves,

leeches into the soil,

in monochromatic brown.

Warmth lingers in hidden places,

in corners and deep grasses,

close to the earth

where roots gather.

Trees are stripped and polished

by wind and sun,

the sky scoured by energetic rain,

cloud buffed and blue-bright.

Slow down, says the season.

Gather in, hunker down.

I comply, storing root crops,

counting blessings by the jar.

I learn to live the seasons,

to differentiate sky calls of greeting and farewell,

knowing that what leaves in November

returns in the spring.

All around me dance the twin fires,

death and life interchanging,

energy and smoke,

the blossom faded, the seed set.

Dark and cold come hand in hand,

arriving early, staying late,

bringing coziness as a house gift,

unwrapping hours of ease,

an excuse to curl by the fire

book in hand, drink at the elbow,

while rain lashes the windows

and the wind wails because it can’t get in.

February

Yesterday

I dreamed I was the wind—

shrill, harsh, shrieking around the corner of the house

scooping snow and flinging it

amongst the moaning trees,

and as in the way of dreams,

I dreamt I was the snow,

a flurry of helpless flakes

swirling, flying madly in three directions at once—

up, down, sideways, veiling the landscape in torn lace.

In the midst of snow and wind

I was a sparrow clinging to a bending forsythia branch,

feathers fluffed against the cold,

guarding my small, valiant heart

against February’s bared teeth.

And I became what hides behind the wind,

behind the snow, beyond the cold,

that which remains nameless in its vastness

its otherness, its unknowable self

except in dreams. That which writes the world

in symbols we struggle to interpret.

November

The trees are dancing, swaying, sometimes frenetically when the wind gusts.  Leaves swirl up and up in mounting spirals until the wind pauses. Then they spiral back down only to be flung into the neighbor’s yard in the next breath. Today’s wind is a cold November wind, the fierce, hurrying kind that sweeps out of the north, gnashing its teeth and shouting.  It’s doing its best to chase summer from the landscape, to make us dig out sweaters and wooly socks, turn up the heat and hunker down.

 Seasonal changes don’t come without a fight. There’s a casual letting go at first with only hints of what’s to come. Warm air is tinged with coolness overnight, leaves lose chlorophyll and show their true colors, and for a while there’s a bridge, a connecting season, a resting, breathing space before the first blast of dedicated winter.

When it comes, that frigid breath, it takes no prisoners. Today’s wind is a harbinger of such change. It speaks of ice and snow and bitter cold, of leafless branches sketched in ink against a bleak sky, of chill silence and early darkness. There is redemptive beauty in the harshness, however. It’s there in every snowflake, in the bright dance of hearth flames, in the diamond sparkle of sunshine on snow, in the scarlet flash of a cardinal’s wing or the stark radiance of the frosty moon.

Ha!

Today's prompt: The 16 Word Stanza Exercise

Three five-line stanzas—each stanza only sixteen words. What can you stuff

into this simple form?

Sunrise brings the 

wind that slept

in the night,

blanketed in moonlight,

pillowed on bright stars.

Wind wakes fully.

no shilly-shallying.

It bends the tall grasses

and waltzes with the

forsythia.

Left on the clothesline

overnight, a lone shirt

hugs itself, its

sleeves wrapped

against the chill.