Winter

Taut trees, they hang naked
Etching gracefully like clustered veins
Poisoned, hungry, for their resurrection
Against bruised hue, night sky and thick cloud all at once

I stand beneath,
Reeling in mental ringlets
I stop and stare, wondering, mocking
As their weathered faces turn to the sky
I think, I breathe—
Whether I lumber my mind with drink?
Till breathing ebbs and flows
With unruffled neutrality

I only wish to know this cycle as the trees do—
To climb from their death in quiet grace,
Only to collapse again in the turning wheel.

Not death: the end is only the other side of rebirth
as breathing, bleating nature bares young
the trees once ashamed
now proud, beaming
their once age-old limbs
unfurling to the sun’s anxious rays

Around the glacier of flora that floods my smell
with eager intent
the cold, now a memory
displaced in the fissures
of all that is in flower

And death—sheathed in ice—
is concealed by the humming
that now burrows the layers of earth,
where each pulse renews what was before.
Grace Wright, 19, UK.