08 November, 2013

Poetically Seasonal

About two years ago, my poetry challenge (30 in 30)continued, and on Day 18 I was asked to write a poem about the city, town, locale in which I lived. As an experiment, I took a prose piece I had written and tried turning it into a poem.


To Every Thing There Is A Season

     I live among rolling hills,
     ancient from the ocean of time
     that built them into brash young mountains
     before wearing them back down
     until little remains
     but the wisdom of age
     eagerly shared as seasonal secrets
     in a thousand different ways.

     Only yesterday those ancient hills
     teased
     and hinted before exploding
     across the horizon, a riot of color,
     shocking with countless branches
     clad for a time in autumn’s best,
     orange and gold and red.

     Today those same branches,
     now stark and dark and bare,
     stand in cold contrast to winter's snow,
     astonishing in binary beauty,
     simple elegance,
     black and white.

     Tomorrow, hints of newborn green
     will emerge from the many mists of spring,
     and what is today only a memory will return -
     expansive spaces,
     verdant green from summer’s bounty,
     meticulously shorn,
     covered in morning dew,
     and sleeping beneath long shadows cast
     by scattered trees partially blocking
     the best efforts of a rising sun.

TGB