Winter Gift

The early morning sun cast aside the last

vestiges of night lurking in tight corners

allowing the first glimmers of dawn to create

suspense, then fully illuminated the overnight

landscape, gleaming and glimmering below

in a breath-catching scintillation of diamond

clustered skeins of snow soft and bouffant

comforting the late November forest for its

pitiable loss of leaf mass, the disappearance

of bracken on the forest floor, dispensing its

incomparable decor over the forest canopy

shielding from critical eye the discarded matter

brown and desiccated in exchange for the

brilliance of a heavenly gift delivered to last

long winter months where ferns and wildflowers

slumber to be reawakened in spring when the

geese now flying overhead calling their goodbyes

return in reverse migration and the snowpack

melts irrigating the forest floor and the raging

raceways that will welcome returning wildfowl.