Poems: Winter Bites and Sister Spring
In today’s Poet’s Corner, Warren Paul Glover shares two poems that capture the magic of the changing seasons.
Winter Bites
Wearing a tabard of blood the robin
stands as winter’s warrior; watchful
as the snow serpent snakes its way
across land no longer green,
her frost fangs plunging deep
into the skin of the earth.
Casting her spell, winter bewitches,
hugging as tightly and close
as the death of strangled light;
her kiss as cold and sharp as cracked crystal.
As that pagan plant, the vampire mistletoe,
insinuates and flatters her way
into the homes and hopes of
a thousand Christmas fools,
holly stabs like a pang of guilt.
And all the while the white blanket
covers the ground,
coaxing the land to sleep.
Sister Spring
As winter prepares to sleep
sister spring unfolds.
The sun, yellow as a marigold,
bathes the land in its warming glow.
Restoring, encouraging,
coaxing the creatures from their hibernation.
Rebirth.
The earth awakes,
nature flinging her colours
out wide over the land,
like flags nailed to the mast;
signals for us, that winter has passed.
Warren Paul Glover is a screenwriter, playwright, poet and actor living in Sydney. With a BA Hons in Sociology from the University of Greenwich, he worked in research and policy for the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and Royal College of Nursing in London for a number of years. Courses in poetry, fiction and screenwriting at Edinburgh University preceded his move to Sydney in 2010, where he also studied playwriting at the Griffin Theatre Company. Warren’s plays, poetry and fiction have been performed and/or published in Australia, Britain, Ireland, Mexico, the UAE and US. Warren’s debut poetry collection, ‘Fashionably Late’, was published earlier this year; details of it can be found here.
