Winter’s Flânerie
It was a dense dewy dusk of December deepening
Seven seconds to seven
The bell beeps
The eventide hymns one could hear
Hallowed,
Conglomerates of cold darkness
Forming with ferocity
Pedestrians walking across the solitude
Of vacant streets,
Numbering the histories of noises that once echoed
Uncannily, new,
Filtered
Through the darkness of a dancing sky
In pains and pleasures pragmatically untold
In rooms where they played Mozart
And waited, with warmth and wonder
For afternoons to assiduously arrive.
*
Threshold
The crowd occupied thresholds
Stillness translated to sculptures of pain
In the dark,
They read Eliot
As midnight embraced dawn
The fireplace, still lit
But they basked in the morning sun
Some planted trees of silence, and some watched through the stained windows
Winter was gone, and some wept because
The withered trees took time to grow
The leaves came, but lived through a poetry of fear
They couldn’t re-write
A history of solitude,
Of inhabiting winters where they grew resilient
They didn’t know
That the quaint teak almirah beside the ornate lamp
Was arranged
That branches of spring caressed the windowpanes
Tenderly, once again
That they still, unapologetically, occupied thresholds.