Winter Night

A night sky it is, with a carelessly-tossed
dark blue velvet fabric shading blinking
stars delivering their messages of overheated
gases in the vast firmament ... but it is also a
winter sky in this hemisphere, and the dead of
winter, at that; harshly frigid, with tiny,
sharp icy projectiles hailing upon the
land gripped in chill bondage below.

It is that fiercely penetrating kind of
atmosphere, where the chill digs deeply
into the marrow of the fragile, the forgetful,
the unprepared. Wind swoops from above,
shoving its daggered, piercing probes into
defenceless, exposed flesh. Its bite savagely
turning molecules of flesh into a solid state
of agonized misery, urging withdrawal.

Winter, purging the seasons of pre- and
-post of relative benevolence. Icy pellets
responding to a shift in winter's implacable
temper, subside, transform into the soft magic
of snow, turning the vault of the sky into the
ephemeral vision of a veil cast over the face of a
more modest visage and the winter storm abates,
wind rebuked, frozen witnesses relieved.