Phil Fitzpatrick is the author of Onchiota Remembered which is available on Amazon.com and at retail outlets in and around Saranac Lake. He has also self-published his collected Poems, Musings Inwords, available on The BookPatch.com. Phil spends most of the months of May through October in what he describes as the downtown, metropolitan center of Onchiota. He and his wife, Briggs Larkin, winter in Rhode Island. For more information about this writer see: pjfadkmemories.com.
Sunlit Winter Meadow
The beauty of this
Sparkling, sunlit snowscape
Mantling the meadow
Warms and opens wide my heart,
I praise and consider uncountable
Individual snowflakes
Imagine masses of people
Harmoniously packed together as
A human quilt covering the meadow
In vibrant splendor.
COLD
The snow squeaks underfoot
and dusts your parka white
Nostrils velcro together
While every thing sparkles
Smoke rises flagpole straight
And the chickadees eat seed from your hand.
Bent Birches
Icy death’s crystal cocoon
Encases and weighs down every twig and trunk
Relentlessly bending the birches who danced
Through all seasons for all their years
How I hate this brilliant ice palace
No matter to me how it prisms sparkle
The handsome assassin is no less guilty than the hideous
Cold snow won’t whisper the joy it knows
But rather shows the sparkle of its heart
Look
The frigid wind comes
Naked and raging with jealousy
He screams at the evergreens
Rips off their ermine finery
Then leaves to sulk
Ashamed to be the slave of winter,
Then joyous heaven’s sunlight
Twice reflected by moon and snow
Softens nighttime cold
Biding us to walk abroad
Each bearing our inner light
Of Christ
Hoarfrost
I knelt to praise the day
And opened my heart
To an open empty milkweed pod
Glowing ambergold inside its hollow husk
It reflected the rising sun from the east
While moonlight dazzled its icy other side
Capturing sun and moon that precious moment
Not unlike those of us
Who are not rooted in the wild field
And on rare occasions both
Glow with our heart’s love
And reflect a lover’s rapture.
Autumn
Autumn comes to us more voluptuous than any of her sisters a goddess of Renaissance proportions
How can we not be charmed as she places on our tables armfuls of round ripened fruits which
Spring bore and Summer raised
Yet there is something suspect in her swaying walk through fields mown down behind her
The birds take notice, gather together and fly south
even as her highlights of garnet and amber shimmer in the trees
We marvel at her beauty and besot ourselves with her scent And only as she turns to leave us are we strangely sad Why just now do we think on friends we shall never see again Why in this season do we observe our age, and seek new beginnings As we ponder she slips away
While Winter rides in on his chariot of white winds To make us pay for the bounty Autumn gave.
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