Winter, After You

On the Season You Became a Stranger

Grief is not a state but a landscape;
you wake in it one morning and realize
it has changed its shape while you slept.
- C.S. Lewis

Snow settles on the silent lawns,  

a hush drawn tight across the town;

I walk the path we traced together

before you left - and took them down.

Your laughter used to warm the wind,

a lantern in the longest night;

now echoes drift through brittle branches

like lost birds searching for the light.

We built our hopes in borrowed winter,

shaping castles made of frost;

we knew the cold could melt them someday -

but not how much a leaving cost.

For this is the first December’s quiet

since you packed up our children’s things;

their names still rise like fog at daybreak,

their absence cuts in sudden wings.

And somewhere in that drifting stillness,

the season turns, an unseen hinge;

a single thaw along the treetops

gives every edge a spectral tinge.

And there it is: the truth you whispered

when promises began to bend,

that nothing built on fleeting weather

can stand unchanged from end to end.

Yet still, the snow resumes its falling,

soft as grace on wounded ground;

it teaches me - though all things alter -

there’s beauty even in what’s not found.

The moral winter leaves behind:

that love, like snow, is meant to land,

to brighten paths for those who follow,

even when it melts within the hand.

GBS jr

December 1988