Earth Journal:
Midwinter

by Audrey Y. Scharmen

Orphan hours, the year is dead

Come and sigh, come and weep!

Merry hours, smile instead,

For the year is but asleep.

See, it smiles as it is sleeping,

Mocking your untimely weeping.

             -Percy Bysshe Shelly

Twelfth Night and Candlemas are past, the faux fir gone from a cheerless room

Where I browse in gardens through yellow pages of a book.

Cold little ghosts creep from the windows and wander in the gloom.

The scene outside the window is a watercolor wash of bleak:

Summer swans seek refuge in a wooded nook

On the frosted shore beside the moire creek-

Watered silk cerulean beneath a swollen sky waiting to exhale.

I step into a morning whispering of snow,

Chill that echos the midnight's gale.

A feeble light casts an opal glow,

The scent of southern slopes and sea spray drift from sheaves

In the ragged plot where rosemary and lavender grow.

I scatter boughs of pine and cedar there to warm the herbs abed,

Gather geraniums pink and pale petaled in frozen leaves,

And spikes of sad sweet rosemary to bridge a moonless month

that lies ahead - laced with hope, tinged with dread.

February bears the bier,

March with grief doth howl and rave,

And April weeps - but, O ye hours!

Follow with May's fairest flowers.

             -Percy Bysshe Shelly

| Issue 3 |

Volume VII Number 3
January 21-27, 1999
New Bay Times

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