Winter Cabin Reverie
by Odin Roark

The cellar door
improperly closed
bangs violently.
The clapboard shedding
white paint chips,
flecks of age
mixing with the drifting snow.

Walls shudder with the gusts.
Windowpanes rattle near shattering,
knowing well the outside’s frozen-forever.

When will guardians arrive,
the stewards of their weary retreat
providing solace for this place
imagination so willing endures?

Harsh punishment,
this loneliness of disuse,
shadowed fear of abandonment looming,
always looming.

The stove sad,
laboring for no one.
The refrigerator longing,
waiting like a giant petri dish
to be opened and examined.

Bed covers squirm amidst
nature's innate seekers of shelter;
Six-leggers passing four-leggers in the night,
Perplexed,
Wondering,
Where is everyone?

Field mice,
the basement's fortress of faith
anticipate the happy slogging
of drunken feet above,
the crumbs falling through spaces of flooring,
affording reserves for leaner times.

Thus awaits the wilderness shelter,
determined to remain alive and ready
as temperatures drop even lower
on this little-respected lifesaver
someone’s rough-hewn arbiter for sanity.

Earnestly it awaits a yesteryear reprise,
heredity’s pass-on-down relay,
solitude’s reason to hold on,
the inducement to stay whole,
just one more year,
like all the years before.

Crunching snow outside raises hope.

Abeyance restrains excitement,
two mice,
three spiders,
and one itinerant squirrel
hold tight their longings.

Just…

Maybe…