Shades of Winter

Winter lingers, drones on 

Snowflake by snowflake,

Unyielding grey, icicle-legged ghost 

Riding the storm in,

No place elsewhere to go.

We compare our aches,  

And the forecast 

From our cell phone weather apps, 

We resent the looming storm

And the complicity of our apps. 

Resigned to the pending grand inconvenience,

We sink deeper into our warm brown couch,

Begin to catalog the span of our lives, 

Break down the on days,

The off days,

The sunny days,

The wicked days,

And as we do,

Time splinters around us,

Into distorted memories and awkward expectations.

The years fall from the sky

And shatter into perfect hexagons

Each ornately distinct,

Twisted hours dot the curvature of my mind.

I think of a blind man 

Walking the streets of Jerusalem

With nothing to steer him across the cobbled stones,

Except a bamboo cane in hand.

He walks the tight ally ways of the Old City

Carrying a burlap sack over his shoulder.

The sack is filled with wood logs,

For my childhood winters,

In another home, 

Another land.

The shrapnels of time keep on falling,

Breaking the delicate snowflakes,

Into tiny grains of vanishing moments.

And we wonder, 

Is the calendar rigged?

Or are we looking in

Through the smashed ends

Of an unreasonable kaleidoscope?

Dr. Azzam Elayan 

Sunday, March 2nd, 2014