The Fall Of Souls In Winter Burning Poem by Zoe Nyght

It hasn’t come yet but I’ll know when it does because
the trees outside my window will bloom flames
and the earth will smell like hot white ashes
freshly lit from an ancient pagan torch.
The winter is harsh and real
and little girls dance like heathens in the streets.

But in this season,
before the arrival of winter like white fire,
trees that never move whisper of
the fall of souls.
Autumn leaves us in abrupt colors
to our own sparse harvest, to wander
lost and barren through dry Indian summer.
Like children we're stumbling
across the browns of the earth
caught between a drifter’s chill, fearing that
our roaming two feet are
as lost as none in their motion,
tied so helplessly to ourselves.

And we yearn for the air to change,
to be able to fall to the ground like leaves
in brilliant sparks of vocal imagery,
to land smack dab in those winter nights of burning
where beauty is set sharply against the sky
next to smoldering flowers,
its destiny nothing less than poetry.
We ache to be enraptured,
to walk along cement paths, to breathe in deeply
the smell of fire on bright porches,
to feel the breath of fall’s snow grown daughter on our faces;
we want to trace beauty in fine circles, our hands white-hot and blazing.

Our fall is dry and we’re feeding the winter in waiting.