Reflections in the New Year Snow
(This poem by Master Wybert was read at the 11th January 2024 meeting of the Fed Poets Society roleplaying event, held in the Shire)
It was just after the New Year that the snows came,
but first came frost and ice,
fixing the landscape in their steely grip,
setting hard the tracks made in December’s mud.
Snow came by night, at first a dusting, then,
blown on an icy breeze,
laying a soft mantle across the fields,
filling the hollows, erasing the contours,
in a seemingly endless sheet of white.
In dawn’s pale light, venturing early into the cold morning air,
I pause at the field’s edge, hesitant,
unwilling for a moment to begin my trek to the upper pasture,
awed, knowing that my tread,
the mark of my passing,
will break the seamless purity of that vision.
Children love the snow.
Careless, with cries of joy,
they run headlong, flinging the powdery whiteness in all directions,
moulding it in effigies, sculpting new forms,
leaving in their wake a wreck of white,
gouged and stained where they have played,
as they rush on, heedless, seeking new horizons.
Here, the snows come each year,
a pause in the endless round of tasks around the farm,
waymarks in the passage of our lives,
inviting reflection,
past remembered, futures yet to come.
We who have lived through many snows,
looking upon that whiteness,
may see a shroud,
wrapping tightly those with us no more,
who live yet in our memories.
A veil, maybe, to hide that which
we rather would forget,
those pieces of our past
which shame us, or which deeply we regret.
Yet, at New Year,
as I look to take that first tentative step across the virgin snow,
I see a new-turned page, crisp, clean, white,
upon which new beginnings I may write.
