We Winter In Darkness

Our lives are brief affairs. 

We winter in darkness. 

And see no light until spring: 

the cruelest of seasons

Excepting summer's apogee 

which is the universal herald 

of famine, pestilence, and war. 

Autumn comes and is gone 

before we have banked our fires. 

Then winter returns, and we 

are plunged into darkness 

and dying once more.

As much strangers to mildness, 

as the depths of the sea 

are to the light of the sun.