Comfortless Power

The forest has been embraced
in a thick white comforter
of snow, a sight to behold, soon
followed by raging bellows of
blasting wind hurtling daggers
of ice-pelleted curtains across
the suddenly transformed landscape
from gentle beauty to raging 
fury. In the city traffic is
stock-still in the shock of
immobility, the roads a thick,
slick menace of ice. City residents
huddle in misery by candlelight
as their homes become unheated
caverns of despair. Frantic civic
efforts to defray winter's sullenly
morose excess pits frail human
ingenuity against pitiless nature,
casually reintroducing her creatures
to the reality of imperial puissance.