Winter Walking [Lyric Poem]

Out into a winter night,
 with snow and silence and fright.
  What's beyond the torch's light?

Rubber boots on crunching snow.
 Oh, how far we have to go.
  An hour's trudge until sun glow
 gathers on the horizon.

  Then walk 'til the day is done --
   again abandoned by the sun. 

We'll set up camp in the dark,
 try to get flame from a spark,
  and dread when next we embark...

a few hours down the line.

Seasons [Free Verse]

I

I remember Spring:
   tight and tender buds,
   soon to blossom

clouds -- low & swollen, 
   & rain scent in the air
II

I remember Summers:
   the season of freedom...

and mosquitoes,
   but, also, fireflies

exploration &
   calamine lotion
III

I remember the Fall:
   harvest time

Grain chaff in the air
   axle grease on the wind

Canadian geese
   Honk-Honk-Honk-ing
   in wedge formation
IV

I remember winters:
   snow days

snow drifts

the feel of the first morning
    of the season in which
    one woke up to a blanketing snow,
    having gone to bed with 
    pathetic matted grass

Frozen Silence [Free Verse]

frozen silence.

but for the rustle of breeze
 against dry grass.

snow will come,
 and a crust of snow 
  will settle in crystalline 
   interlock with the brown stalks.

the snow will absorb sound,
 muffling reality,
  until nothing remains but
    frozen silence.

Bone Cold [Blank Verse Sonnet]

From a stove-heated room, the snow brightens
one's mind with hope that all will be made clean,
but cleanliness is next to nothingness
and nothingness is next to loneliness.
From inside, snow is silencing and light.
It's fine and shifts like sand in desert dunes.
It's silent like the depths of a cabin
at midnight on the prairie before time.

From outside, snow saps all of one's resolve,
and makes one wish to flee the purity
it pretends to generate all around.
The cold, it bites like a full-body vice.

The feet go numb, but brains... they fire wildly --
they shake one awake, but dare one to sleep.