The Wintering
The bones of warmer days winter where they lie
and great gallows of branches bear down upon
withering orchards
with their rampant weeds and self-seeded harvest
of bitter herb; summer's blooms fade and the skin
winters also, and these bones
make solemn prayers where those flowers
full and heady, sought golden apparitions;
but then, some dreams just shatter
bones break, and skin stretches, sags, wrinkles, cuts,
bleeds, scars; after all what are we, but fragile petals
perpetuating winter with our suffering
and what are we, but golden blooms luring butterflies
and birds and insects and other less desirable things;
misery, besets even the loveliest of bones
burying lilied thoughts, cursing the most tender kept
gardens; and time forsakes all – even your words dig
into me now, where once they begged dead flowers
'bloom' – making ash out of what was once, stardust.