For Alex In Winter Poem by Seamus O' Brian

Winter comes like an early blanket of uninvited darkness,
smothering the sunset end of my November days;
creeping like the white bones of a frozen graveyard
over the fields and highways, through cities and towns..
Like a Siberian zephyr moaning snow and frost
in heaps and piles where once we remembered roads.
And suddenly the great maw of winter chews me
small again, not a player but merely a spectator.
I remove my pilot's cap to shamefully find
it is but cardboard and crayon as winter escorts me
once again to the passenger section of this flight,
my 48th pass through this section of the solar system
known to us northern hemispherers as winter,
known to the universe as nothing,
known to God as life.
As death before resurrection, darkness before dawn,
so the restocking of the mountains must precede
the silver ribbons of spring.