Is it winter?
The trees are waiting to be clothed
Arms and branches
lifted up to the heavens
Staves – ragged upright wooden bones
Sup life with a little soil – frozen
Limbs clenched through the wind
Some lose weight and watch their friends
Keep warm through the winter
A family of four
And so their lack becomes their gift
Just as the great stave from before
The rest of the poems from Rusten Harris’s Advent series on Moss Kingdom:
Incarnation, Christmas Eve, Kings, Some Kind of Glory, Chains, Gifts, Quotidian Couple, A Thousand Lights, Eve & Mary, Treasured Up, Christmas, Winter Staves, The Glorias, Cherubim, Joseph, Strange Redeemer, Womb, Magi, Temple Trough, Advent, Lord’s Day, Far as the Curse is Found, Jubilee, The Massacre of the Innocents, Liturgical Time
Other Advent poems on Moss Kingdom:
December 21: an Advent poem for the Winter Solstice, Of Edmund and Aslan, Tiptoe Hope, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Other poems on Moss Kingdom about winter: