February Poem

FEBRUARY

Oh, February is the strangest month
In which to celebrate love’s feast:
No roses bloom, no fruits entice,
No floral scents suffuse the breeze,
The sun emits no ardent warmth.

Beyond the sharp, black tracery
Of silhouetted sycamores,
The pallid moon is cast adrift
Upon a sky of chilly mauve—
The colour of despondency.

With frozen face of frosted pearl,
The floating moon impassively
Observes the pale and tepid sunrise
Flush with modest, bloodless pink
The bleak, blank, dawn-grey world.

Enmeshed in mist, the anaemic sun
Attempts to rouse the frigid land,
To warm the sky to cobalt blue,
And with its weak and wintry radiance
Burn to ghostliness the moon.

And at love’s feast in February,
Other odd couples sit in bistros,
Bodies close, but minds far drifting,
Prisoned in opposing quadrants
Of a vast and starless sky.

The evening darkness, like a shroud,
Cocoons the myriad meagre scenes
Of scentless flowers, dim candlelight,
And sentimental serenades
Obscuring the existential void.

The players in this tragedy,
Each burning with unslaked desires—
“What I expect…” “What I deserve…”—
Poke at the ashes of their love
With cold, hard ironmongery.

And yet, beneath the frosty ground,
Through dull and dreary February,
Roots humbly bear the dark and chill
To quietly nourish living shoots:
Small parables of love abound.

And patient, rain-soaked, storm-lashed trees
That bow and bend before the gale,
So to preserve their infant buds,
Are truer tokens of true love
Than all the rituals of love’s feast.