Winter Is Coming Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Winter is waiting down
at the gate to the park
like a vein of chalk
scribbled in the fleeting warmth
of adolescent love
amidst the swinging sliding
metal silvers.
She is scaring away
the song birds
and hurrying the remnants
of Spring to close up;
Spiders go busily unhinging
murder-cobbed webs
to dissolve with the
weather upon the
bladed lips of anemic grass;
Their children unseen
except for their many legged
thought, hurry into the
autumn hay bales stacked
at the edge of the
murmuring creek;
so they are gone when
he comes,
falling from the sky on
his white and chilly steed,
when she steps forward;
Then this sphere is its
furthest from the sun,
and in her night sways
like a drunken lover
in the snowy sheets-
The trees are naked
and frozen, as she
reaches out to touch the
earth;
her tears solidify his lap,
saying things I cannot hear,
though alone in this house
I watch her lips begin to
blister the windows,
the material of her dress
is the hoarfrost on the lawn,
as her lonely footsteps
echo up to meet me
from the other side
of the door.