Canadian Winter Poem by Frank Halliwell

At dawn you hear the crackle
As the sap in frozen trees
Splits the tree trunks like a gunshot
Down below fifty degrees.

And the crying of the kee birds
As they circle in the sky,
In ever smaller circles
'Til they vanish bye and bye-

Up their fundamental orifices,
Or so the story's told,
In their fruitless desperation
To escape the awful cold.

Turn on the car's ignition
And all it does is groan!
You forgot to plug the car in,
And the motor's turned to stone.

But the sun on newly fallen
Snow's a magic fairyland,
And windows all display the art
Of Jack Frost's gifted hand.

There must be other places
Where the weather's more perverse,
And the moment that I think of one
I'll write another verse.