The winter, with its white,
Blinds our sight:
Everything is sleeping, not dead.
What is not sleeping lies quite still,
Or barely moves:
Our heavy coats keep out the chill
But we move more slowly,
As our boots trudge up
The snow covered hill.
There on that silent summit –
If you are brave, if you are patient –
You can see with winter eyes
And you can hear with winter ears.
The red holly berry,
Amid brown bushes and gray earth,
Leaps brightly like a star in dark night.
A clump of snow, softly, quietly,
Slides from a branch to the ground, all white.
A crow, high above, cries out in the stillness,
But it does not speak to you,
The crow, like the deer and the mice,
Has its own business.
And all around the strangely silent hill,
The city stretches, just as strangely still.
It is the power of winter to hear the sound of nothing
That muffles the shopping, the driving,
The fussing and the striving.
The towering trees, with their bare branches,
Reveal a sky that lays hidden in summer.
The trees do not speak to you, but they let you listen,
As their hands, covered in ice that glistens,
Beseech the great sky above.
Stars that hang like a thousand points of ice
Receive that silent winter prayer of love.
The prayer includes you but is not to you.
Having witnessed, you will return home
Where you will join the world in sleeping.
