The Slumbering Forest

The forest knows nothing of
superstitious days of sinister
reputation; it slumbers peacefully
irrespective that this is a Friday,
the thirteenth day of a new year.
Insensible to the ways in which
time is measured, the forest has
its own reckoning of time passing
and yet to come, what it has
experienced and what nature will
endlessly repeat in a plenitude of
green growth and the stark limiting
of that progress as growth recedes
taking shelter from irascible winds
tormenting the aged trees of the
forest, beset by bark-cracking ice
while life-sap takes shelter in
roots firmly ensconced beneath a
forest floor rich in humus sheltered
by the snowpack. Nature wills
her creatures to endure and they
do, an alchemy of memory biding
time heartened by the sun's bright
clarity on this auspicious day.