Snow - A Sonnet

Clouds hush the wood with dreary shadow in the night,
their cover making secret the star and moon light;

with darkness there comes a terrible freeze
that cracks the tree branches with a bowing breeze.
It silences the cry in the whippoorwill's breast
and frightens the chickadee away in his nest.

Over field spread patchwork and pines rising tall,
one snowflake shivers while it spirals and falls
to settle with its fellows on needle and cone
or pile, pale on pale, against bare mountain stone.
Many soon follow, blanket hills with their cold;
fill the river valleys, hide the ruins of old.
 

Animals pause, raise their heads where they kept;

country folk with bundles slow in their steps
to glance at the tufts in their marvelous descent
from clouds that are thinning and passing, now spent.
The world is a-glimmer, a true shimmering sight
and the trees, like layered cakes, are coated in white.

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