The Wake of Winter's Reign

 This poem was born from the tension between beauty and grief. Between what returns each spring, and what doesn't.

I wrote The Wake of Winter's Reign while reflecting on how the natural world can stir memories we think we've buried. Spring has always seemed like a season of hope, but it's also a mirror. For many of us, its arrival doesn't erase the ache of loss, it sharpens it. Flowers bloom, birds return, the days lengthen. And yet, we still carry what (or who) is missing.

The poem moves through images of thaw, rebirth, and regrowth, but the emotional undercurrent is more complicated: it's about loving someone who's gone and continuing to live in the seasons they once shared with you. It's about planting anyway. Returning anyway. Choosing to stay, even when staying hurts.

Each stanza weaves between present and past, echoing how memory often works; sudden, tender, relentless. The speaker wanders through landscapes of both the earth and the heart, unsure whether they're grieving, healing, or both.

The final two lines of the poem:

"So spring arrives, and gently speaks my name, then leaves it trailing in the tulip's flame."

These lines appear on the cover of the full collection. They felt like the most fitting words to encapsulate what this book is about. How something as small and quiet as a flower can carry both pain and promise. How the seasons don't forget, even when we wish they would. Or when we hope they won't.

This poem is one of the emotional centers of the collection. A soft goodbye. A fragile hope. A blooming in spite of everything.

The Wake of Winter's Reign

The frost retreats beneath the greening hill,

its grip undone by one soft breath of rain.

The wind grows warm, but trembles, quiet still.

A robin sings above the thawing plain,

its call both question and a lover's vow,

as if it knows the ache that sweetens pain.

The trees begin to bend their bony brow,

and stretch their arms in slow and leafy grace

no longer bare, no longer broken now.

A thousand buds rise up to take their place,

like whispers rising up through crowded sleep,

like kisses left on lips the cold can't trace.

The lambs are born; the roots begin to creep,

the world refills its veins with waking fire,

and memory returns where it runs deep.

You crossed a field of clover, climbing higher,

the hem of springtime caught between your hands,

your eyes alight, your laugh a bright, brief choir.

Now every bloom obeys your old commands,

though you are gone, the scent of you remains,

still trailing through the grass in golden strands.

The past returns in fragments, soft refrains,

in lilac wafts, in songs the blackbirds weave,

in shadows drawn by windows etched with rain.

What lives in spring must also learn to grieve

each blossom knows the cost of reaching wide,

each petal dares the sun, but will not leave.

The thaw does not erase, it will not hide,

but shows what slept beneath the crust of snow

the seeds of joy, the bones of those who died.

A field of daffodils begins to glow,

like candlelight held steady in the breeze,

a soft defiance only flowers know.

The air is thick with hum and hush and tease,

with bees in bloom-drunk trance and wings gone wild,

with every tree half-sighing through its leaves.

And yet, despite the green, the world feels styled

as if it wears a mask of warmth and light,

concealing truths that lie beneath the mild.

Your voice was once the thaw that broke my night,

the thaw that woke the garden in my chest

a sudden sun, too fierce, too full, too right.

But now I walk alone where we once guessed

that love could be as endless as the green,

where hope once bloomed and futures came to rest.

The orchard swells with life where we had been,

each tree in bloom, each branch a silver thread,

a ghost of touch that lingers on my skin.

Do seasons mourn the lives they've led?

Does spring recall the hearts it failed to mend?

Or does it bloom, indifferent to the dead?

I do not know if loss begins or ends

the circle turns, the bluebells bow and rise,

and time just folds, then gathers, then pretends.

But still I plant, beneath forgiving skies,

with dirt beneath my nails, and ache within,

and faith that something lovely still will rise.

For this is spring: a reckoning, a sin,

a resurrection stitched from rain and root,

a bloom that bursts though buried deep in skin.

And though the song may never sound as true,

though you may fade like mist against the day,

the earth remembers even after you.

The grass returns in every shade of gray,

the flowers come, though none of them the same

and I remain, and still, I choose to stay.

So spring arrives, and gently speaks my name,

then leaves it trailing in the tulip's flame.

E. C. Mira