Original Poetry: A Cold Season

[honorat]

by Honorat

This is an assignment I gave my students: Write a sonnet with the rhyme scheme: quiet, kiss, riot, abyss, trees, June, peas, prune, crystal, bar, pistol, guitar, brooded, concluded.

So I did one too, and here it is for what it's worth. You can guess what kind of weather we've been having around here--it's -25 C.


Inquire into origins of quiet.
Winter mystery touched with snowflake's kiss
On frozen branches, in icy riot
Tracing fractals. Glimpse into the abyss
Of darkest lake, a silver sky in trees
Caught a prisoner forever from June
warmth and the flirting fragrance of sweet peas.
In some distant hand, chill knives of frost prune
the soft lines of life into sharp, crystal
Planes, glittering. From summer's heat a bar
Forever, the black ice cracks, a pistol
Shot. The lone wind strums through boughs like guitar
Strings, its bitter song; a cold thought brooded
O'er arctic world, unmoving, still, concluded.

Comments

[honorat.livejournal.com]

In the 50's! Cold!? All right I'll give you damp--damp can make cold a lot colder. It's a cliche here that the cold is dry, but it's true. The snow is so dry it can hardly melt into water. It's like fine diamond dust, not even slippery. The windows of my car never frost up! NO moisture in the air at all. Last week the muskrats were swimming around in circles in the lake trying to keep the ice back. This week, I'll bet they're hibernating. I wish I was--but so far my alarm clock keeps waking me up. It's not the cold that bothers me, it's the frozen eyelashes by the time I get to my car!

I'm glad you can enjoy my winter vicariously. One has to do something constructive with it!