Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, WINTER MOODS, by LUCIA CLARK MARKHAM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

WINTER MOODS, by                    
First Line: The bare trees write their poems on the sky
Last Line: As year by year the transient seasons range.
Subject(s): Winter


I

The bare trees write their poems on the sky
With the frail silver stylus of the mist,
Memorial odes of some romantic tryst
With presences that hover tenderly
And weave ethereal dreams to trail and die
Down airy paths of dim remembering,
Where echoes of immortal music swing,
Left from the harps of angels going by.

And that wild impresario, the Wind,
Sets these pale cantos to a ringing chord
With rippling rhythm and syncopated breves,
While the tall bards await the calling word
To doff their stark austereness and to find
Again the green frivolity of leaves.

II

Winter is the biographer of trees,
He writes their histories as I ride by,
Reveals each hidden eccentricity
And secret graces that no summer sees;
The sycamores are warriors at ease,
Their giant limbs carven, marmoreal,
The willows, poets in an empty hall
Dreaming of vanished idealities;

The naked birches, naiads at their play,
The elms, ascetics choosing barrenness
Their transcendentalism to express;
The garrulous cedars venerable and gray,
Stoic philosophers refuting change
As year by year the transient seasons range.





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