Season of freezing.

Why should you feel wrong, wrapping yourself in ice?
We trudge towards the season of freezing,
And surely it is only to be
expected.

Spring is for blushing buds,
bursting leaves,
thrusting shoots:
growing warmth.

Summer is for ripening fruit,
violent sweetness
splashed hungrily on a
thunderstorm canvas.

Autumn is for mourning,
leeching scarlet and verdant
from a landscape swept bare
to sepia bones.

Looking back at scrubbed-clean memories of
seasons long abandoned,
nothing left but the litter
of their tedious passage -

Standing uncertainly just beyond a
horizon once believed unattainable,
taking breathless inventory to be
sure of your arrival -

Seeing with elder eyes the havoc
once casually dismissed,
now felt keenly, now aching,
now regretted -

Turning with cautious regard
towards a fresh unknown,
a recaptured undiscovered,
a seige perilous -

No wonder you long for winter,
for a moment between beginning
and ending and beginning,
for stillness.

No wonder you long to settle a white mantle
about your weary shoulders,
and hie you, with the bears, to a season’s
quiet bed.

Looking back along your sodden path,
footstep after footstep after footstep,
I do not wonder; in witness, I am not
a little tired myself.

Gird yourself in snow and ice, my friend,
and rest you on the silent bier.
Fear not: I and my three other swords will
stand sentry while you sleep.