By Ice Purified

February, the cauterized month,
Stems the old year’s bleeding.

Drag-marks in the snow:
The wings of birds’ or angels’
Feverish searching…

Beginning is for later;
Time has ended.

For the dead past, to remember it,
Some stain the earth.
Grim epitaphs, flushed and livid,
Too many schemes, too many ploys,
Rub against each other
And the dirty gravel roads
Jostle the skyline.

Some let the running hours run,
Blood in every second,
Crimson tides of it:
Beating, pressured, pulsing.

Even when the fallow days come.
And snowfall stifles sin and secrets,
Covering ice distorts
The frozen sweepings of history,
The forgotten and the undone.

For tomorrow to come,
Some would leave the past obliterated
And make the present a hollow ruin.
For an imagined future,
Some would put aside justice.

And some would take blades,
To carve away the truth.
Others would straighten every path
To reach a far-off vanishing point:
No turn, no deviation
Narrowing into the featureless distance.

In the red clay of the year
Blood was curdled and the sun
Shot to pieces in a pallid sky.
Anger stalked the streets
Bottomless rage in every shadow.

In the hard end of winter
In this still point before another year,
There is time to clear yesterday away.
In this moment, at least, we might look for love
In the skim of ice on the world
And thaw it out.

© BH 2015

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'Maybe it's the time of year. Maybe it's the time of man. I don't know who I am.' Joni Mitchell, Woodstock.

Something about February. You can feel the year turning in it. Longer days, even as the cold still bites, bring something optinistic. All the grinding time before can be held back. We've abandoned our hopeless resolutions, reflected on the absurdities of the past. Now is the pivot on which the future turns.

Tomorrow may be as harrassed as our entire history but, there in the ground, in the ice-caked surface, life is quickening. Warm it in your hands.

This poem is #1 in a pair about our loveless, hopeless, tough-guy times. Too long and probably too wordy to go on a single page. Now infinitely reworked.

Nuff said. Go on, read Too Many Things Are Done (part 2 of this). Read 'em and weep!