Lit eZine Vol 4 | p-15 | POETRY | Winter is a Careful Nurse

SHORT POEM

WINTER IS A CAREFUL NURSE
by Selma Martin

(Inspired by John Keats’ Sonnet — The Human Seasons)

Maybe it’s in the youthful years
of spring when green and blissfully
unaware if one wakes or sleeps,
and remotely untouched by the
prospect of an imminent end,
Man uncurtains heaven and
fails to see that one cannot
prolong the night—that in the shores
of darkness, there too exists a
budding light; that in the sullen mist,
uneven stones still mark the way
to lead the feet with mental might
through untrodden greenery. Maybe.

Maybe it’s in the verdant breath
of summer that man uncurtains it,
drowsed in its fiery noon hours
of cloudless skies where hardly a
stir of air there be, yet so much
life exists within the feathered grass
unlike in spring when he chewed
on nature’s naive cud uncoiled,
unblushing and unquenchable
from dawn to dusk: still unaware
that winter is on its way. Maybe
 
Maybe man’s Phoenix wings take flight
in autumn. Uncurtaining the heavens,
melodizing it before the
wintry days with Hecate’s spells
and faery powers that bring the
fully ripened hand of chance
before the winter winds and
freezing stars—not clear in summer,
not there in spring; unheeded
before, unheeded no more for
now the soul listens—one season
until Winter, whose melancholic
penchant to numb limbs, with her cold
fingers, touches man’s lips and
curtains him off to heaven, where
he lives forever unaware
if he wakes or if he sleeps.