I spoke in frost across the windowpane,
As sacred text the morning light embraced,
And children touched the language none could name
Before the sun undid what I had traced.

I was the stillness after midnight falls,
The hush that made the sleeping farmhouse creak,
The silver breath on barns and chapel walls,
The only god to whom the pines would speak.

Rivers kept my secrets under glass,
Meadows wore the quilts I sewed from snow,
And deer moved soft as prayers before mass
To drink from wells that only winter knows.

But something in the cardinal’s cry foretold
The end: the ancient covenant had turned,
That I must learn to lose, to shrink, to fold
Myself into a longing, barely mourned.

The icicles grew thinner every noon,
My kingdom wept beneath the melting eaves,
The crows returned to mock the fading moon,
And one by one the frozen ponds took leave.

I tried to hold the shadow of a birch,
To cradle one last acre in my arms,
But March came gentle as a hymn from church
And blessed the muddy roads and waking farms.

Now I am just a coldness in the shade,
A memory the oldest granite keeps,
A hush beneath the roots where oaths were laid,
The dream from which the sleeping orchard weeps.

Tell them I was not cruelty but rest,
That death is not the opposite of spring—
I drew the world in quiet to my breast,
So it might wake with strength enough to sing.

So let the thaw come soft, and let me go,
I’ll leave my silence folded in the stones,
And when December whispers of first snow,
Listen close—you’ll hear it in your bones.