Real Hope and Love---Nature's Allegory

Hope lies like a strangled robin without wings,
Dies like a fire without flame,
Smolders like the smoke that always stings,
Whimpers like a foe's impugning blame.
Love turns her cheek like a maiden's blush
Hides like the winter's ivory hush,
Slides over life like a tattered glove---
Such is the presence of love.
What fragile symptoms of this world!
What difficult walls to breach!
As still as a tendril lately curled
In springtime's loosening reach.
Yet gladly to these mangled shores I'd go
If once I could catch a flake of snow
Pure white, somewhere lost in the tangles of time
Hidden beneath decades damaged with grime.

One Spring Dream

Feel for winter, feel for life,
Feel the snow and feel the ice
Toss the flakes toward bitter air
Taste the wind, so crisp and rare.
Leave behind your dreams and hopes
No one, living, ever copes
With the winter, if they dream
Dreams that cannot ever be.
Let one thought alone inspire
While you wait for heat and fire:
Let the single hope of spring
In your broken heart take wing.
Somewhere, somehow, it will come
It will melt all else to foam...
Dream, but let that dream remain:
Buds that cling to winter's stain.

Winter's Admirer

What do I see but the pale white veil
Of the hills like white envelopes of winter mail?
What do I hear but the yearning cry
Of a dozen gray geese in the Arctic sky?
What do I smell but the crisp, thick fume
Of the smoke in our snug brown cabin room?
What do I taste but the syrup's sweet
Of the maple's vast and enriching treat?
What do I feel but the warm, soft glove
Of the man I adore in the month I love...
The season I cherish, so full of sensations
I love, deeply love, without hesitations.

Beauty and the Beast

I see the snow--such velvet snow--
As if the very sidewalks glow,
And then, conversely, view the trees
Stripped bare of all their molded leaves.
On one side, beauty---snowflake bound---
The other, Winter, driven 'round
To shake the roads with frozen hands
And slake the thirst for warmer lands.
I want to take that velvet throw
And lie beneath the cooling snow
I won't today--today I'll see
This melding Beauty and the Beast.

Hue

A thousand leaves spin from the sky
And fill the lanes with scarlet dye;
The trees at night are ringed with dew
Like hardened bits of pearly glue.
What season turns the brush to flame?
Not summer, with her gentle name
Not winter, with her savage snows
Nor spring, where roses bud and blow.
These months are full of light and heat
Yet nightly ices still defeat,
And though the geese seem self-assured
They wing away, like all the birds.
One explanation must be true:
This must be autumn's fiery hue.