Winter Splendor Comes Too Soon: Poems and Images

Winter has come "with a vengeance," as we say up here when the season changes this quickly. We were happily enjoying our usual November weather. We dutifully booked appointments to change to winter snow tires, and carefully brushed the light skiff, the barest frosting of powdery fluff from deck and sidewalks, digging out the snow shovels for when the real snowfall would come.

Remembrance Day was crisp but manageable -3 Celsius, give or take a degree - certainly not chilly enough to drive the cenotaph ceremonies indoors. Saturday was a positively balmy -1, and a light skiff of snow fell that night. Then, on Sunday night, Mother Nature dropped a foot and a half of snow on us - in three hours. Along with that, she pulled the plug on the balmy temperatures for the thermometer dropped to -20 Celsius that night and has hovered just below that ever since.

Winter came far too quickly this year...

The dogs and I must now enjoy our morning and afternoon walks very quickly, for though there are many lovely winter vistas to admire, we are too chilly to linger. Where once we marveled over the play of light among the branches, now we frame the picture, click the shutter, and move smartly down the lane towards home and warmth.

Soft grey on softer sky, the trees, alive with crested friends,

Yield frosted feast of fruit and seed, one festive last goodbye

To autumn's riches...

Winter splendors tend to be the chilly sort.

Crystalline, diamante, sparkling with too-icy fire

That breathes on toes and fingers,

Sending hands and feet for warmer pockets, fleece-lined boot.

Winter splendors come too soon.

Each year unwary and unwilling souls wish warmth would linger,

Spinning tire on road, in ditch;

Too soon off-road, they end in snowy-banked remorse -

"Next year! Next year, I'll note the signs and better trim my sails

For wintery blasts..."

Yet next year comes as years will do,

And finds souls set with backward glance, unready yet again...

Warmth and harvest richness seem but a blink away,

Perhaps they were a dream...

So now we dream of warmer times, and climes where sun beats, brazen, down;

Where white sand beaches beckon winter refugees,

And promise bootless freedom for all sand-warmed toes;

Yet bootless long for warmth at home,

For winter splendor's come - too soon.

Frozen feet in icy ditches, red-winged choristers' former home,

Golden gleam in morning sunlight, ragged tops now winter-blown;

Green you were, and heavy headed, brown and full your lofty crown

Nodding gently to the waters; frond and tip, your verdant gown...

Woven, leaf and frond, in basket, boat of reeds in ancient song,

Once to Pharaoh's daughter bore you, proud and safe, an infant son;

Now you stand in frozen roadside, far from sun, from Egypt gone;

Proud and thick, your rustling voices, thronging dugout, slough, and pond,

Whisper to the winds you story

Of a boy you saved for glory;

Every seed that flies before me

Bears the rush's summer-longing

For release from winter's binding;

Wait in ice-bound rags 'til springtime

Once more greens the ground;

Then, once more your murmuring music

Weaves with wheat a summer song...

'Til then, O sentinel of former grace and graceful, bending form,

By drifted field and rutted lane you rustle faintly,

Keening on the winter gale your tale of foreign lands and princes,

Sultry breezes, sand-etched temple, ankh, and flail, and winding river;

Dream of a far-off summer from your frozen, trenchèd, ice-locked stand...

© 2011 Text and photos by Elle Fredine, All rights reserved. Photos may be used only with express written permission from the author.