The Revelation of Winter’s Warmth
by Odin Roark

What values do we so readily disregard
these short days of winter?

How easily we ignore
air filled with crystalline arrest,
bestowing remembrance of colors in respite,
while we engage our will to embrace
the resistance, the invitation to accept.

Winter ushers us to perfect seats
where bows of pine and oak wood
curl their needle and leaf
into protection and sleep,
a wisdom we know little of,
nature’s ancestral intransience.

This stage of emptiness soon overflows,
like protective strands of lace interlocked,
woven crystals that cloak bare branches
while crusts of ice bear final witness,
time’s cover for now,
irrigation come spring.

How wise
this four act saga of nature,
void of discrimination,
knowing how little life requires
of comfort we so covetously horde,
even as rarefied light,
that which never hides in the shadows,
always provides,
if only we would pause…
allow.

Fortunately

An audience of seeds will survive
amidst a huddled awareness,
providing innate connection
to all that is,
from all that was,
those knowing well
that which patience rewards.

When will we learn…

Survival of the fittest
understands beyond the science,
beyond a season,
gathering carefully the warmth to offer later,
one body to another,
revealing the exponential wonder
to other unique crystals in flight,
the we of them,
the them of us.

Nature’s singularity,
so very near for some,
a winter’s cold away for others.