Winter Trails

2 Poems: To January and Of Silence

January emptiness smarts on skin,
cleansed, braced, embracing sentience to begin
at this beginning: shake off the cough, thrive
in flock shock, aggregate your ideas, shrive
your orts -  induviae* hung to dry or rot -
make more memories as others are forgot. 
With all the fuss of festival, though hard,
welcome workaday, stamp boots in back yard.

It’s true life on ground is sparse and bleak slows,
hardly frays, though mud-splashed, and little grows,
yet as always we can look to the sky;
and though the grey may linger for our sigh,
birds play dragons where their agile flocks span
and blinding sun will make what love he can.

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*induviae are the leaves(and other things like seeds or fruits) that don't fall but wither on the tree.

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Of Silence

You say I don't know what true silence is?
Alone in dark I always hear a hiss;
it’s true, a tinnitus* tells me I live
and robs me of a silence that might give
simple respite through night or day, a state
to steep in, deep suffuse and meditate.

And yet I do know what true silence is:-
denier of love, injunction against bliss,
halts inhalation and makes the step infirm.
In loneliness we suffer cold yet burn.
It is ‘the rest...’ before and after breath,
wraps our brief interim in, Oh, a death.

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*Ringing in the ears - a very common affliction.