I feared you when Summer began to cool,
wishing we wouldn’t be here for those many frozen months that always feel like stones are being piled outside the front door,
needing to be unstacked just to start the day,
only to re-appear the next morning stacked even higher.
Winter is coming, everything will take more work, more time, more patience.
When you finally arrived in full, unfurling your deep silence,
I remembered your saintly gifts,
felt your stillness filling the night with holy whispers,
saw your hand in the frozen fog that transformed every pine branch into a crystal needled sermon.
Head tipped back I stared in awe at the sea of stars above, beckoning my soul to join you.
No prayer settles so deep in me as Winter’s invitation.
Spirit entices me gently throughout your reign,
promising that I be sustained not by warmth and food,
but by this pause in the breath of life that is always here,
within and without.
I will seek out the sliced moon, cold ground that does not yield,
being alone without loneliness.
My ears open to the world fully,
filled with your invisible song, not of death
but of allowing that which is finished to fade,
that which will come
to burrow in deeper,
and ripen.
Crusty ice framing the sidewalk is its own sacrament now.
Rivers shelled in glass, never shaped the same as the year before,
have new secrets to tell,
new trysts to make
as they savor the changing shape of their own bodies.
Because I have warm blood, I will always fear you,
but I have remembered how to welcome you, receive your invitation with gratitude.
I will pass the story of your hidden compassion on to my children and grandchildren,
so they can sit on a cold Winter night and wonder at the grace that brought us all
together in you.
