Last Winter

I thought I'd posted this here a long time ago but apparently not... Back in late 2017 I was invited to the church poetry group. Bring a poem, they said, on the theme of Christmas or Winter. I thought I'd read someone else's but the family said, 'No! You gotta write your own.' But I only do non-rhyming, barely-comprehensible, takes-itself-far-too-seriously kind of stuff ... and mostly when I wore a younger man's clothes. Anyhow, I caved in and this is what transpired. It's set in the winter of 1982/83 but rooted elsewhere.

******

Last Winter

That was the winter

I finally
came apart;
every rusted hinge and joint
sundered
by the moon's waxing
and the waning,
draining,
of my heart.

Every pound of
flesh, every ounce
of life's burden
heavier than could be
held aloft;
arms too leaden
to even raise
a surrender.
No more place

for
words
or
breath
or
silence.

The only necessity
the dissolution
of every last atom;
redundant
and craving its
release
into the blue nothing.

That was the winter
spring came in May,
its resurrection
and deliverance
a gift so unknown
it was beyond tears,
the

delicate and deliberate
unveiling
of a life
given, laid down, offered,
and a death
taken, embraced, suffered,
and a love
wider, deeper, broader
than the harrowed edges
of time and space.

That was the spring
winter

ended

for all time,
coffined

in a borrowed tomb.