Winter Shadows Fall
No stilts, just a winter shadow and Merry Christmas....
Warm or shivering?
How is it that some are warm, some shivering?
Is it only bad choices, fickle luck?
The rain falls on the just and the unjust;
sunshine, shadow, and the cold do, too.
This winter, as with so many,
the "brotherhood of man" is being challenged.
Charity's opposite is made more glaring;
brotherhood and sisterhood more needed.
The winter shadows lengthen.
The warming sun is so precious.
How do we thaw men's hearts
when the season itself is so cold, so long?
With shepherds tending their flocks by night,
Christ's birth must actually have been in spring.
That we celebrate it in our winter season
is perhaps no accident of man's devising.
Perhaps we are best reminded of why He came?
Perhaps so men's cold hearts might be warmed?
Perhaps it is so God's own precious baby might stir in us
the instant love man and woman find in every newborn.
North of the Equator
winter shadows fall,
lengthened by the sun's low angle,
warming bathers far to the south.
Bundled and warmed,
we stroll the sun speckled streets
putting forth our own jet trails
as body-warmed breaths are shocked.
Gloved hands and covered ears
keep cold at bay for some.
Others seek out heat vents, doorways,
all-night diners, and overpasses.
Children frolic amidst the flakes of snow,
mindless of those others,
once children themselves, no longer parented,
save by their loving Heavenly Father's tears.
Television and films are mindless, too;
devoted to the bizarre and sensational.
Christmas, with its all too brief season,
reveals the Dickensian corner shadows
Those shadows, too, are longer in winter.
The dark hours are longer, lonelier for many.
The cheering flowers are brown stubble.
The pockets of sunshine promise only a spring to come.
At times in winter, spring seems so far away.
Illnesses, like the shadows, seem longer.
Now retired (except for jottings) there is time to think,
and ponder life's unanswered questions.
____________
© 2015 Demas W. Jasper All rights reserved.
