The cruelest month

Which is the cruelest month?

Is it the one that buries the land

under a burning red; the month that calls it

beauty when it bares the trees and feeds

off our sorrow?

Which is the most heartless time

of the year? It must be when we watch

the light die, when we hear nothing but

the lonesomeness of this world. I am not

cleansed by all this white; I feel only

the cold in your blood, the fear when

you abandoned me.

I thought that life would return

with the coming of new leaf, but

the cruelest month only rains down gloom

and grows its hope from the grief

we buried in the earth, and I wonder:

if this is what has become of you.