Tanita at [fiction, instead of lies] hosts Poetry Friday today.
At the Beginning of Winter by Tom Hennen
In the shallows of the river
After one o’clock in the afternoon
Ice still
An eighth of an inch thick.
Night never disappears completely
But moves among the shadows
On the bank
Like a glimpse of fur.
Meanwhile
Trees
Grass
Flies and spiderwebs
Appear alone in the flat air.
The naked aspens stand like children
Waiting to be baptized
And the goldenrod too is stripped down
To its bare stalk
In the cold
Even my thoughts
Have lost their foliage.
Going to Walden.z 
Oh, my goodness…what a stark and beautiful poem…those aspen. Wow.
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Calming and restorative, words and image. Thanks for this lovely moment in a busy season.
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It is that starkness that gets to me, though I think it’s beautiful. In the cold I look and look, seeing what I can find that’s interesting, something I can’t see with leaves. I love this, Tara, “like a glimpse of fur”. Hope you have some times by the fire this weekend!
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Ahh, lovely. The images of the ranks of naked trees, standing like penitents to the baptistry, and night never disappearing completely just evokes such a charcoal-sketched world. Truly beautiful.
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The snow is like time, erasing all our labors and making everything new again.
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What a beautiful poem–just like the stark, haunting beauty of a snow winter day. Thank you for sharing.
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Oh, my! This post is so lovely. Both your prose poem and Tom Henning’s poem move me. I so appreciate the stark beauty of winter and these words resonate, “The landscape, empty of color, cleanses my soul.”
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