Here in North Florida, we do get frosts and even hard freezes, but the seasonal cycle is really more like spring-summer-fall-spring.

For most of my life, though, I’ve lived in places with real winters: snow flurries, blizzards, ice storms, freezing rain, slush, slush that freezes into lumpy ice, snow-plow piles of old snow coated in layers of urban soot.

A deep winter, like the one New England experienced in 2013 – 2014, creates a deep silence, a deep sorrow. Snow muffles sound. Wild animals perish from starvation and cold. The weather brings on internal reflection. And then, some stunning, unexpected beauty — the blood-red life of a cardinal at the feeder, the chickadees’ energetic squabbles, sharply-angles sunlight striking an ice-coated branch.

I don’t miss winter. But, I remember its power in this poem, Sheepscot Wellspring Cemetery, just published in the enigmatic magazine, Cleaver. Don’t miss their “Ask June” advice column, and all the other great poems and stories in the December issue.