To Make a Frost Flower

Athens, Georgia

December 14, 2015; revised 2016

You could go a whole life 

scarcely aware of ephemera. 

How frost flowers grace 

the morning hours in unkempt 

ditches, ragged shoulders, 

borders and abandoned fields 

that first hard freeze of fall. 

Consider the white crownbeard  

how it grows. It flourishes 

in heat of summer, flowers 

ugly early autumn, leaves 

a stick carcass standing 

barren to the bitter wind 

that rattles down the winter. 

But come the quiet dawn 

when cold envelops open 

fields and seeps inside 

the hardened earth — 

when morning crackles 

frostweed blooms. Up 

from old roots, sap bleeds 

through breached stems, 

oozing into open air

as frozen locks of cotton 

candy, silver swirls 

of crystal clouds leaven 

its now broken body. 

Translucent grace is born 

to morning, gone by noon. 

Wounded by winter the weed 

turns guts to ghostly flowers 

and waits for the inconceivable 
spring to rise again from roots.