Late Frost
written by: Michael R. Burch
The matters of the world like sighs intrude;
out of the darkness, windswept winter light
too frail to solve the puzzle of night’s terror
resolves the distant stars to salts: not white,
but gray, dissolving in the frigid darkness.
I stoke cooled flames and stand, perhaps revealed
as equally as gray, a faded hardness
too malleable with time to be annealed.
Light sprinkles through dull flakes, devoid of color;
which matters not. I did not think to find
a star like Bethlehem’s. I turn my collar
to trudge outside for cordwood. There, outlined
within the doorway’s arch, I see the tree
that holds its boughs aloft, as if to show
they harbor neither love, nor enmity,
but only stars: insignias I know—
false ornaments that flash, overt and bright,
but do not warm and do not really glow,
and yet somehow bring comfort, soft delight:
a rainbow glistens on new-fallen snow.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
I had Robert Frost in mind when I wrote this poem, thus the title “Late Frost.” Robert Frost was fond of the word “arch,” and it’s here because of that fondness. The poem imagines him as an old man and a skeptic, but one who never really made a complete break from his childhood faith. The rainbow created by the “artificial stars” was not something I had planned … in fact, I believe I wrote that line before I understood that the Christmas tree ornaments were creating the rainbow.
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