A Frost on the Day Before Easter

A night of falling mist froze
tight around the windows and doorknobs,
lintels and posts, encasing the apartments
and their courtyard garden
in the coldest coat.

Beneath the feeble morning gray, nothing shines
or sparks; the light falls flat
and seems to die within each item that
it shuffles across: a child’s bicycle
fringed with hanging teeth,
an abandoned pail,
the tools left out in yesterday’s sun:
hammer and nail.

No birdsong breaks the shuddering quiet,
The silence of a stillborn spring – yet
what can they all be murmuring,
this row of tousling evergreens? What peasant prayers
or tears does this procession offer,
bowed low in rumpled robes of ice?

No ear to hear, nor any eye to see,
but each plant lies expectant and
the scattered objects wait,
whisper, indicate

to where a fallen statue lies
cracked at head and hands and side,
His shroud of ice shook loose, and sloughing off withal,
beginning to thaw.