Advent: 2020 (Blank Verse Version) Poem by DM W

Winter's name: two staccato syllables
That are echoless; like a broken drum.
Winter is the bare- bones of a season:
When life's vivid colours are extinguished.
The year's flesh is flayed in its harsh weather.
It turns memory into nostalgia.
All it offers are tenebrous shadows.
Time is frozen in its sterile kingdom.
Hope is shrouded in its long, bitter nights.
Yet winter the cruel enslaver, also
Begets Time the redeemer; the saviour:
When the dormant Word awakens and then
Brightens into meaning via Advent.
It's arrival is winter's nemesis.
Like dew that falls upon crisp, frosted grass,
The muted, fragile, yet knowing sunlight
Of the Christ child's birth will flicker gently
Through the frayed, black, leafless branches of trees
To break malignant winter's sullen spell
And revive the withered sinews of earth.