Dry leaves scrape across the pavement,
night sweeps down its veil of mists,
turns to hoarfrost in frigid darkness.
Bare, stygian trees like broken relics
Guard the lone and silent highway.
Rime coats an errant ribcage:
a dust of stars for old, frozen bones.
Sleet falls in time, twinkling like glass,
Glacial rust and blades of bloodless grass.
Lucid ice crawls forsaken stones.
A child’s voice cries and then is gone.
Incredible imagery here. It feels more like the beginning of an epic than a stand-alone poem.
I absolutely love the near rhymes you use here and the wintery landscape you’ve created here both captures the mysticism surrounding winter as well as the apathetic brutality it carries with it.
Not much to add, except a dust of stars for frozen bones was the line that really did it for me.
Made a couple of changes to smooth it out a little.
Definitely digging the changes.