Settling Into Winter

Settling Into Winter

Wickedly bad tempered of late
she has sent one of her acolytes
to vent his ill tempest upon us
simply to remind, lest we forget,
what forces they are that obey
Nature, corresponding to our
frail-minded clinging to puny
humankind's feeble management.

That ill wind, in intense
intercourse with a tempestuously
plunging atmosphere, and a
side dalliance with those
battered, bruised clouds venting
vapour over the land
has us cringing in paroxysms
of mortal distaste.

Trees surrender to naked despair.
Fish dive deep and anxiously hover.
Birds make frantic haste
to leave this familiar space.
While insects burrow deep
to wait out the annual tantrum.

Creatures of the forest gather
what they may to make
themselves scarce as the
landscape inexorably alters. We
grimace at the discomfort of
increasing displays of distemper.

Cringe before her directed onslaughts
of frigid air, wild wind, icy sleet, rain
and snow. Like other animals
we wait out the angry funk.
Awaiting opportunity to resume
the ease of changeable
Nature's goodly graces. 

 

 

Winter Day

Hour after muted hour frozen crystals
fell from the lid of a silver sky to
swirl and sweep across the landscape
tossed by the wind on this frigid
winter day.The forest under that low
ceiling of cloud discarding its treasury
of brilliant flakes furbelowing all that
lies below is still and serene, absent of
sound absorbed by the lofty down of
snow bringing comfort to unseen creatures
settling themselves as dusk falls and the
dark of night begins to creep its presence
where the eerie vision of the last vestiges
of wind whispers a veil of snow from
a snow-laden bough, where birds have
taken night shelter within the confines
of cedars, where ectoplasmic shapes
have sifted over old tree stumps and the
sound of the creek running through the
forest gently lapping ice forming beside
the shoulders of its banks is hushed.
As the departing wind shifts aside the
clouds, the setting sun sends ribbons of
pale blue and pink across the sky and
there, above the forest canopy as though
resting on the mast of a venerable pine
hangs the moon shining her silver gaze
upon the snowbound landscape below.


 

Imprisoned

Imprisoned

He is a prisoner, held fast
in a dim, dark recess of his mind.
His body has failed,
holds him prisoner to
its sudden collapse. Post
open-heart surgery, doctors
induced a prolonged coma.

Thus is he threefold a prisoner
unable to convey the thoughts
his brain processes into an
awareness of his pathetic
life-clinging stubbornness.
He is aware, through the fog
of pain, anguish and drugs.

Alive, but barely; vital signs
diminishing, day by crushing day.
He is on what is politely termed
life-support. Machines ventilating,
breathing for him, beating his heart
to a steady pace, cleansing his kidneys,
tubes infusing him with saline, insulin.

He hears, through that all-enveloping
fog, the distant murmur of familiar voices.
Wife, son; near mute with the passion
of their loss, their grief raising his blood
pressure, alarming the doctors,
puzzled, uncertain of his clinical state
his catastrophic collapse.

For the operation, severe, but routine
was a textbook success. 

A Tale of Two Walls

A Tale of Two Walls

Unexpectedly, spectacular in its bitter resolve
to remain there, squatting mercilessly
as the symbol of irreconcilability
it suddenly, miraculously imploded on itself
collapsing, leaving a host of dazzled,
confused, triumphant prisoners
to emerge, the light of freedom realized
settling into consciousness like the
heavens themselves revealed. Free at last.

Echoes of another, earlier release
from brutal bondage barely recognized,
memories of the living dead released
from death camps. How precise is this irony
that the murderously irenic-averse
population complicit with the annihilation
of the pestilential Jews among them
suffered themselves a dim shadow of the
relentlessly mortal agony of official genocide.

The cleansing of the community,
the nation, the continent and ultimately
the world, of the existence of predatory
power-assertive, controlling Jews.
Shakespeare would have thrilled to
this moral dilemma, the bleak humour,
the black destiny, the upheaval
and the clever disposal of so many
throwaway lives, from infants to
three-legged doddering babblers.

Yet another anniversary; that which presaged
the cruel turmoil, the incessant slaughter
signified by shards of gleaming glass, goes
yet unacknowledged. There are the usual
preliminary dark clouds gathering on the
endless horizon of man's inhumanity to its own.
Another Kristallnacht abetted by the demonic
slander that soils the atmosphere. Perish
the very thought! But all the symptoms, the
signposts point unerringly there.

The dissenters - all those whose livid hatred
of surviving world Jewry become now citizens
of their very own land, their sovereign country -
speak of their own truth; their resurgent bigotry
has found its very own theme to augment
The Protocols, with another wall of desperation.
This one separating not a single nation with
polarizing ideologies, but two separate nations
one of which designs to obliterate the other
while proclaiming itself the sad victim, the
other the evil damned-by-acclamation occupier.

 

 

Our Selves

Our Selves

Suspended in the primal aqueous
security of our mothers' wombs
we take presence in the genetic soup
that forms us, absorb our mothers'
plaintive whispers of accented fear;
experience beyond memory the pain
and anguish that will mark our days.

Leavened by primordial nature's
ever-evolving displays of being
and the opportunities we are enjoined
to grasp, complementing destinies,
fulfilling souls' desires. In the process
finding elusive pleasures. Discovering
possibilities, clasping them close
and in a lifetime hurling ourselves
into the future, the reality of life.

Neatly side-stepping when we may
the imperial realities of all existence that
inform and forewarn us, even while
we studiously look elsewhere
preferentially remain oblivious
to that long and steady journey
an imperative we cannot deny.

But then, why linger on the distant
inevitability when we can take comfort
in the meaningful present. Impressions are
what form our memory, our being,
clasped close to the heart of who we are.
While we are here, the who and what we
are is what must consume our being.

Silently

Silently, cresting the blue bowl
of the sky, the snow goose
spreads wide its wings
loftily gliding in its
mundane ecstasy of flight
this mid-November day.

Well below, sturdy masts
of gnarled old pines stir in the
prevailing, insistent wind.
In the depths of the woods
stir creatures of the wild.

An owl, unperturbed or
deliberately unmindful of
anguished, irate shrieks of hawks
the racketing of mobbing crows.
He roosts, in a tree crook
master of surveillance
to swoop when he cares to
upon un-vigilant mice, hare,
voles and birds not of his
distinguished feather.

Oblivious to the riotous drama
woodpeckers clank lustily
on trunks of spruce, pine, fir.
The lunatic peal of the Pileated
rents the atmosphere.

Signalling arrival of dark
scudding clouds obliterating
the wavering, late-afternoon
sun. Soon, ice pellets strike
against the landscape.
The chattering of nuthatches,
chickadees, waver, then still.

The lion of winter testing his
imminent arras. The season resists,
damping winter's ardour. Sleet
turned to innocuous rain,
thrilling the primeval moulds,
mosses, lichens and ferns.

Look, there - on the forest floor
a body, swiftly decaying.
Its red breast and sadly
dishevelled feathers a mass
of compost to enrich the
leaf-dense, richly damp earth.
Tardy migration has its price.

Tranquil and Still

The fiery orb of the sun
burns its passage across
an ocean-blue sky, its
warmth concealed by the
ice-fire of a winter day,
wind whirling and whipping
feathery snow into every crevice.

Bright spears of sunlight
pierce the crowns of deciduous
trees, their limbs black and bare
against a landscape heavily
sifted with snow, stumps in
ghostly shapes haunting the
atmosphere, tranquil and still.

The snow, powdery-light, sits
fully on conifers transformed
into delicate white pagodas,
translucent in the blinding
light.  That transcendental
light of the sun paints a 
glow over the  canopy of
the forest, capturing magic.