Winter Poem by Roy Ballard

King Winter stripped the boughs of Spring's green leaf,
uncluttered every twig and left it clean.
Now naked skies are etched in sharp relief
with secret writing hitherto unseen,
a cipher coded in complexity
that's written in a multitude of lines,
in twisted tangles of perplexity,
in skeins of old man's beard and snaking vines.
The summer's blossom and the leafy dead
lie tattered on the field where they were felled
or thinly hang where untold numbers spread.
In livery of white, by frost compelled;
they wear the uniform of winter, king,
who is the start and end of everything.