the weight of winter

The season desaturates and withers all life once vibrant,

violent winds wreak havoc like a petulant tyrant.
Ice tightly constricting every brittle branch
the weight makes them quiver and bend and snap;
once lush fields under innumerable tons of snow, buried and trapped.
Weather unrelenting, sending whole trees down to level cruel,
as a storm's fresh powder tests its symbolic virgin renewal;
its nothing more than a crystallized mass reminding:
that this fatalistic world is alone and prone to dying.
The doldrums of winter cast irreparable impressions upon every life touched
but the invisible depressions borne of this season matter as much.
Days of such little length that light leaves in a blink,
natures grace survives in brief rays that singe skin pink,
for night reigns sovereign and grim, overturning day like a falling leaf,
swiftly snuffing our source of relief from hypothermic grief,
injecting our veins with a coursing cold that wont flush from our system soon,
leaving our sole bearer of illumination a weak, ghostly moon,
a pale imitation of a sought-after sun too often unseen.
Creatures struggle to wake as first light arrives,
merciless midwinter mornings attempt to suffocate lives,
stoically pressing down on early birds wanting to rise.
Grey dominates the palate, melancholia the mood,
bland the taste of every morsel of squirreled-away food.
Hope is a moon-pass without a shiver,
or clouds that swim by without spilling their fill;
hope appears an earnest allowance this world cannot will.
Shuddering spreads head-to-toe, body-wide,
while snow makes cold caskets for those whove died,
and winter presses harder on struggling lives.
Joyful thoughts are long forgotten or wished,
this is time of war where one fights simply to persist
in an unarmed resistance against a foe with an iron fist,
and each second beckons a recurring question and self-reflection:
Can I go on?
Endless second-guessing turns the war within and without;
Within, winter whisks away willpower, bearing down a daily storm of woe,
every hour owed to toiling, tilling acres of mental terrors sowed.
Without, nature efficiently resets seas of former staples -
goldenrod stalks shriveled and bleached, bend and bow,
nearly grazing their tips on permafrost ground -
until every thought burdens heavy,
is nature in this state inescapable?
Coarse gales whip west to east, sandblasting every exposed being
with a flash freeze and foregoing any notion of ease and peace.
The dearth of birds sings a silent tune unknown,
leaving the dry-bone wind to whistle alone.
Fleeting wisps of sunbeams lapse behind the horizon, countless creatures die on the earth,
their claws pry into hard dirt crawling toward the light, looming darkness signals the worst.
Winter defines the relativity of time:
its the feeling of forever merely masquerading as four months or five.