Winter Garden: A Meditation

In winter’s hushed and vacant garden,
I sit alone,
my breath the only pulse of life around me.
My being hangs suspended
on the brittle bones of a dying maple.
Its snow-clad limbs, white as funeral cloth,
feel strangely unfamiliar today.
I am a wandering star,
fallen out of the sky’s forgotten orbit.

Frost’s cold mumble trembles through my bones,
awakening memories buried
deep in time’s secret wells.
Left crushed beneath a weight of stone,
They melt slowly in the stillness.
I dissolve into the vast nostalgia of existence,
as though the universe abandoned me
at the rusted window of an unseen watcher.

Above, clouds circle like hunting hawks,
gathering into a roar of approaching ruin.
From the dark well of thought rises
a mermaid of forgotten dreams.
A nameless touch ripples through my mind.
The dead walk through flawless darkness,
then curl into their final caves,
where questions flare like sparks,
only to fade into still, invisible shadows.

I draw in that drifting emptiness,
like a toxin, yet I wait
for memories purified by suffering
to step out from the dark.
And when winter, with its slow and secret thaw,
returns the world to a light never seen before,
a light whose colour, shape, or shadow
No one can ever understand.thought skims my mind,
light as frost on a shuttered window,
settling into the shadowed hollows
where questions fester, unresolved.

I inhale this wandering void,
awaiting revelation
with the slow, inexorable thaw of winter.