Winter Poem

One of the things I did when I found out Cindy only had a few months to live was to sign up for a couple of online classes to give me some structure.  I knew I would need that to keep me moving forward through the grieving period.  There have been times that I wished I hadn’t, but on the whole it was a wise thing to do.

An assignment I had to do this week was to write poetry.  It may seem strange that a woman who has written a book and keeps a blog does not see crafting words as a strong suit, but there you have it.  I was not looking forward to this particular assignment.

The parameters set forth for the first poem was to take a walk in nature.  Walk for five minutes, stop, and take in the scene around you.  Walk five more minutes and do the same.  And then another five minutes and once again, soak in your surroundings.  Take notes, or in my case since it was a bitterly cold day, take photos and then craft a poem from the experience.

The second poem was to be constructed by a random word list generated by a software program.  I got a list of ten words and needed to use at least eight of them in a poem.

I thought I would share the first one here.  Not because it will set the literary world on fire, but to share the healing process.  Because I found that going through this actually helped a little.

Here you go.


The Dead of Winter
The park is desolate today...


    gray
        bleak
            cold
                empty.


It mirrors my heart...


    wintry
        sad
            raw
                exposed.


The dead of winter.
A death in winter.


The landscape and my heart
a frozen desert....


    empty
        alone.


Bare, barren vines and branches exposed...


    freezing
        abandoned
            tangled
                ignored.


The silence is crushing,
the wind is biting,
tears are stinging


I walk alone.


In the dead of winter
mourning a death in winter.


Alone in the city
where everyone else
has the sense to stay inside
through the
     gray
         bleak
             cold
                 empty park.


My eyes sweep
to the colorless ice
along the water's edge.


I stop.
There is movement.


A muskrat
foraging for food.


Oblivious to me,
    to my thoughts,
        to the cold.


There is life in winter
In the dead of winter.

---