A Winter Elegy

Winter beleaguers me, as it whips and wails me, through the window glass.

Everything once that lived, curled and shriveled, has ingloriously died before me in mass.

It came weeks sooner than it was supposed to come, again this year,

And bounds me to home where I sit 

In a contemplative hypnosis—

This is my annual metamorphosis.

The first snow comes like Pearl Harbor every year,

And begins a bitter war I have with winter that lasts until spring

When I crawl out of the house and tend to my gardening—

When good sense allows it, and its safe and warm for people and worms.

This miserable snow that comes too quick,

Unexpected in the night like 

An unwanted child that squeals in delight 

Of terrorizing my only life. 

And there it sprawls out and drapes 

And infiltrates, and smothers, and rapes. 

Weighing down the branches of my once 

Proud golden privets,

And burdening my junipers under its burdensome weight.

Clinging to everything like a 

miserable, slow cancerous growth.

I am not one to marvel of its wonderous luster, 

To see the brightside, the mistletoe amongst its merciless bluster,

That smothers everything in colorless white.

But that, in contrast, leaves everything dingy to sight.  

I took the day off, not to enjoy it as I used to, long ago, 

But to mourn the loss of Fall,

which is somewhere unceremoniously buried beneath the snow.

Or if nothing else at all, to mourn my aging soul and its succumbing plight.

My decrepit bones and paper-thin skin. 

My deterioration, which it seems happy to exploit and expose again. 

I have improperly weathered myself, try as I might.

I stare dejectedly out the window

Like Jack Torrance in The Shining.

As dithering snow plows with flashing lights pass, scraping and grinding. 

Throwing salt like panzer tanks in their courageous counter-assault.

There are a few idiots out there 

Like displaced eskimoes,

Or little ice goblins and snow hoes.

Then comes the shyster kid carrying a shovel 

Beating upon my door

Wanting forty bucks and not a penny less

To clear my walk and broom my car of this proliferous mess.

I'm supposed to admire his business acumen, 

But he and his smirk I abhor.

He and his mullet head,

He and his wasted youth that has bled from me in all my dallying—

So unfairly it bled. 

And then the neighbor and his gas-powered snowblower that blows like hell,

And the cripple from the salvation army tolling that irksome bell. 

There are birds out there, still, somewhere. 

Squirrels up in the hollows of maple trees,

Of whom I'm left to wonder, 

How in the depths of the cold do they not freeze?

They are nestled in frozen nests

With only the fluff of fur or their feathered vests

To warm their bones. 

And the houses once so lively, which now appear worn and weary,

Their windows with blinds drawn, lifeless, cold, and dreary. 

The sky, overcast, some abysmal shade of gray

Like it is neither morning nor afternoon.

The color of an old bruise.

We've been buried in a cold lifeless mass grave,

As though this bitter world has forgotten what it is to live,

Or as though it gave up, in that it has nothing left to give.

The sun is somewhere, but it is nowhere to be seen.

Leaving only the frigid and the obscene.

Then the phone and its cacophonous ring

Shatters what peace I had amassed in my drey—

It's the pharmacy peddling a flu vaccine.

Everything is paused and ruined. 

There's nothing keeping time. 

No sentry snowmen in the barren yards

Of white fertile blankets.

No igloos, or snow forts.

Nothing to bring me any joy or comfort 

In the absence of roses blooming for bees,

And warm summer winds blowing through the foliage of the trees. 

I hadn't even put away the pumpkins

That wilt on the porch and seep

As I sadly sit on the couch, bound in blankets, and weep.

Weeping words no one reads.

We aren't used to it yet—

Being that it's barely December

With Thanksgiving leftovers still in the crisper,

As the cold howls through the barren willow branches, 

A baleful and haunting whisper.

It is this "jolly" season I detest.

There's a bonfire in my bones left over from October

That came and went too quick.

This misery is undeserved, I protest.

My senses, and sinuses, and spirit are unnerved. 

And here I sit on this couch, staring madly,

in my malady, 

Into the dull glow of winter's bitter abyss.

But—surely I'd be remiss 

Not to mention, or to even ponder—

That there are memories in snow

That there aren't in summer, or in rain. 

Unexpected days out of school.

Sledding with my kids, now grown.

And even back further, as a child of my own. 

Snowball fights with good friends

That I regret I no longer know. 

Ice skating on frozen ponds,

Football, bundled three layers thick,

And sledding down hills

When I was young and impervious, 

A stuntman—the constant seeker of such thrills. 

But now it is a flu-in-wait, the chance to catch a fatal cold—

A sickness that howls out the window

Ominous and menacingly,

Stirring in a portentious pot,

Rude and threatening me.

And all that good are but ghosts that haunt my memory. 

Stay in, stay safe, stay home.

Don't wander, don't wonder, don't roam. 

How I wish I was not as ill as I've been,

And my kids, or I, were young again. 

And friends still lived up the street,

Or were a phone call away.

How I wish I wasn't afraid to die and 

Still knew how to play. 

I have forgotten that it seems, as silly as it sounds.

How I wish that my youth had not abandoned me so quick and carelessly 

As I had abandoned the joys of lovers lost, 

and the toys of such dear a cost

To parents long-since passed away. 

Such as all this, is just as the sun has abandoned the day. 

Though this is just the first snow

Of many more ahead,

Maybe I will muster the courage and strength,

Or find what I did with my youth.

Maybe it's in a box, just beneath my bed. 

Or perhaps, somewhere, lost in the attic of my head,

Past all the cobwebs and broken hearts,

All the masks I once wore, and the abandoned arts. 

But as I drank a second cup of coffee,

A sad cowardly beggar for warmth and safety, 

Little more than a bug on the couch of my old age,

I was suddenly inspired to not die there in resignation,

And I was possessed with a defiant rage. 

So I rose and dressed, and dug out my old busted sled 

That was buried by twenty years of clutter in my rickety shed,

If only to prove to myself that I was alive 

And not dead before I died. 

I broomed the car off and drove to the hill

In the town park

Where I used to take my kids. 

And I parked, a half hour or so before dark.

As always, there were broken plastic saucers, and abandoned trash can lids,

And mateless gloves, and various sorts of things,

Scarves strewn about, lost mittens, and busted inflatable rings.

Things that had not survived. 

There was but a handful of people still there that late, 

Leaving just as I arrived.

I crouched and got a cramp as I slid

Down the hill, giving my life up to God and fate,

In search of a last thrill. 

I was at the mercy of frozen tree stumps, and roots, and rocks,

Wishing I had put on a hat, some gloves, and a pair of warm wool socks.

On my belly, like Superman, I sped down that old dark hill I knew better than former wives—

That hill on which I had lived so many wonderful lives. 

Speeding faster than I remember ever going before,

Not thinking of how sore I would be,

And feeling that old familiar thrill that I thought had long-since abandoned me. 

No one was left to notice, or care, 

Of an old man in the youth of senility, 

Who sled alone, dodging trees with what was left of his ever-dwindling agility.

That October bonfire left me, 

Along with my fear and trepidation of death.

They were left on the hill with matchless mittens and broken bits of cheap plastic sleds. 

And suddenly, I was young again, full of life, and breath. 

As I sped up and shot down the hill, 

It was as though I slid into the past for a moment.

I could feel my son on my back and my daughter on my shoulders.

I could hear them laugh as we dodged trees that were widowmakers 

And rocks that were like boulders. 

The wind howled and the snow fell,

And the sky turned black

As I barreled into a shallow grave of oak leaves and landed hard upon my back.

And I lied there looking up as though ascending through space,

Mesmerized by giant snowflakes that fell softly upon my face.

And as the snow and its white death consumed me as it had all the leaves of the trees,

An invisible sexton did his duty, and read the winter elegy

Which he must have read a thousand times before.

And in those snowflakes I could see the faces of my kids,

And of long-lost friends and loved ones I still adore.

And I was ferried to days past, and a time I had thought I lost, there alone.

But I realized that they were safe in the pocket of my soul all along. 

And as I lay there dying at the foot of my busted sled, no better a gravestone,

Like a broken piece of something not abandoned or lost, but forgotten,

I was redeemed and fearlessly to death, as once to life, joyously I was begotten.   

"A Winter Elegy" Poem by Adam Nobody. Copyright. 2025. 

Dying in a Snowfall. Painting by Benjamin J. Young. Watercolor on cotton paper. 2025.