Winter Days

Another winter day in the forest that
mysterious home to the natural world
of creatures excluding humankind where
the everyday drama of survival is enacted
in a continuous cycle of hide and seek
the hunted and the hunters. Furtive creatures
moving silently and swiftly through the brush
fleeting glances that see and take note but
are in turn unseen. It is a place of perpetual
dusk where the forest canopy shields the
understory and the forest floor from the 
glare of natural light emitted from the broad
dome of the sky above yet obscured 
despite the winter sun's brightly piercing rays 
revealing the stark monotone of a forest 
etched in stark shades of black and white. 
The penetrating cold has iced the forest stream 
to a frozen platform successive snowstorms 
have buried. Old tree snags humped with snow 
are as ghostly as the opaquely white skeins 
of ectoplasmic veils lazily erupting in a fall
released from the snow-laden boughs of
spruce, pine and fir by the ferocity of a
wind complementing nature's coldest days
and nights of the year, a frozen tableau.