Back Issue Winter 2004-05

The early winter world seemed dull and dark.

The hills were black, the woodlands bleak and bare;

Beneath cold skies, in thin light, pale and stark,

Brown, empty fields lay scattered here and there.

The morning came, a gray and windy dawn,

When in a haze of thick fast-falling snow,

The hills began to fade and then were gone;

All day the snow came down on all below.

Then with the rising of the gibbous moon

The wind died down and all was calm and still;

The moonlight fell on drifts the wind had hewn

And we could see again the distant hill.

That night the moon shown bright enough to show

Our chimney-smoke’s soft shadow on the snow.

Burt Porter

Burt lives in Glover, Vt with Lindsay Knowlton, who is also a fine poet. He plays fiddle and mandolin and has taken parts in the films WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH and ETHAN FROME. Burt writes a sonnet every year at Christmastime.