seasons poem

seasons poem

The sky was a pure gray. There was no texture from the clouds, no wind causing the clouds to

move, simply a light gray that took up the entire sky. It was late fall, days before winter. The

trees no longer wore colorful red and orange leaves, they had all fallen to the ground, becoming

brown and no longer crunchy. The trees were but empty husks of sticks in the air, the occasional

gust pushing them together to make a melody of percussive sounds, and yet the world still

seemed so silent, so empty. Just weeks earlier, the sky was blue, and the leaves created a

beautiful sight from the bland green of the previous summer. The wind would blow, and the

leaves would soar through the air wondrously, as the scorching heat was now replaced by warm

in the day, which turned to cool in the night and morning. But that was all over now. Soon, fall

would end, and winter would take the world over. The comfortable cool would turn into a

persistently insufferable cold at day, and the nights and mornings would be a murderous,

sadistic freezing. As if taunting humanity, the winter would never bring us the gift of snow. We

remembered snow, the one saving grace of winter. As spring had its pink flowers, summer had

its green leaves, and autumn had orange and red leaves, winter's source of beauty was its

snow. Walking outside into a different world made of snow was like nothing else in the universe.

The crunchy, soft, white ice powder would cover the streets, the houses, the grass, and the

trees. The entire town would appear entirely new and wonderful under a coat of snow. Children

and adults alike would play in the streets and fields, sliding down hills, throwing snow and using

it to make walls to avoid getting hit, making people and art from it as snow was an art itself. But

there was no snow down south. Not anymore. Now it seemed the winter days and nights would

get so cold, just frigid enough to kill anyone without the protection of shelter from the weather,

but never cold enough for a single snowflake to fall. Or worse, snow would wall and melt the

second it reached the ground, so close to the miracle that we had years ago, so close to a

return to what we took for granted, but as if mocking life, it wasn’t so. It was a painful reminder

of what winter was here. Death. The grass would be yellow and dead, the trees without leaves

and dead, the poor without any warmth in the streets, the animals crossing the road, the hopes

and spirit of anyone and everyone who saw winter for what it was, cold and miserable and dead.

Winter would come soon, and there was nothing that could stop it, nothing we could do other

than buddle up, stay inside from the cold, and pray for the day that spring comes back to hold

us, to comfort us, and congratulate us for surviving, warming us up and creating flowers to

repair the trees. Flowers that will turn into leaves with the summer, which will burn us, and rain

on us, and love us and hate us, until fall arrives again to cool us down, to make the trees a

beautiful canvas of red and orange, to bring fun and fear and food until fall falls out, and the

leaves all fall down, giving way to winter. Cold, freezing, careless, sadistic winter. Where the

world is cold, and dead. The trees and the flowers and the grass and the fun are dead. There is

nothing but cold, suffering, and death. No one to hold us and warm us up. Months and months

will pass, and we will feel cold, sharp air on our skin. Our toes and fingers are purple, and our

limbs threatening to fall off. We go back inside and cover ourselves with jackets, layers, hats,

and gloves. But it doesn’t help. It's still cold. There's no touch of another to be felt. Only the

freezing air that wishes to make us suffer. All there is is death and no love or beauty to be found

past December. So we yearn for the days that the sun burns us alive in summer. Yearn for the

wind to blow in our faces in fall. Yearn for the pollen to infect our nostrils in spring. Yearn for the

trees and grass to yet be green again, or any other color than the dead it will be in winter.