Nature's Winter Cathedral

The mid-January sky of this new year is a

dome of silver shimmering with the promise

of snow. Soon cascading diaphanous veils

of silvery-white frozen crystals descend on

the waiting panorama already deep in

acquired layers of a winter season's lavish

snowfalls that have laid the forest floor thick

and deep in a comforter laying the forest to

sleep until spring's arrival. The forest glows

with its luminescent layers overlaid with the

fresh offerings from the clouds so uniform the

entire sky has become one widespread cloud

relieving itself of its starry burden. Muffed

radiantly yet the atmosphere an embroidery

of snow tumbled here and there by the wind

billows and hollows on the forest hillsides 

echo no sound in the serene silence of the

forest. Its still-running creek makes no sound

nor do the birds nestling within conifers whose

branches hang low with the accumulating fuzz

of white draperies in a landscape of deciduous

trunks like dark sentries in the white cathedral.