Poet’s Corner : Tyler Lascola

For Winter

Observe! the Earth’s infirm decline,

For there could be no surer sign

     Than dog-day heat

     On Spring’s clean sheets;

O Winter, how for thee I pine!

 

Hymn to a 

Wintered Wood

The sky’s comprised of splinters: Winter cracks and snaps, it barks and backs against the tracks; those hailed rails, trusted once, must’ve busted, luster lost and rusted now, crusted brown, thinner, bitter, bent and bowed, strapped in snow by frozen rows of wood intact, where Winter wouldn’t act, it couldn’t hack the wood; inaction won where chunked-up limbs once hung as one, beat back the sun, that chap-lipped chap, that addict trapped, withdrawn as long-gone days of light oft strong lie sawn by longer nights quick-drawn, by blades of frostbit lawn, by gray and jaundiced prongs, by ravens lofted on their hairline cracks, caws causing shivers, frosty claws like slivers scratching the fractures magically captured, frightening lightning etched in time, petrified in silver sylvan matter, whitening, whipped and battered, stripped and shattered on the Winter wind, windows clattering, slim, those quaking panes shaking faster, faster as the snowflakes blow and gather; they obey their master, Mister Chaste and Purest Bastard, iron-fisted caster of the cold-spells clipping past her; pastor to blasted past and masses crass with laughter; brash harasser of that lass whose boots you plastered in that morass, the coagulated quagmire quickly quaffing crystal liquids, sipping insipid precipitation so patiently placed, appraised and debased by the faces kissed and embraced by the flakes, their businesses distant, replaced with kids in the midst of an intermission, a mystical Winter vision: a crystalline Yggdrasil.

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