A Good Book in Winter

A good book holds appeal
especially in winter
when someone’s died
inside or outright
and others live
to tell a story
of when and how
and why life matters
and in the cold
we climb inside the covers
to live there for a while
in someone’s story that is our own.

Especially in winter,
it is as C. S. Lewis wrote,
 “Day by day nothing seems to change,
but when you look back
everything is different.”
Life happens to us
and without our noticing
we are changing, aging, dying.
Then someone writing interrupts;
like the Good Book breathed by God,
the truth gets told again,
and we see ourselves as we are.

Like a shut door swung open
by its weight on hinges
death gives way to life,
like winter stiff and cold
sure to give us spring
like a memory
with beginning, middle, and end
to be told
midst crocus and narcissus
and we  knew it all along
but waited for someone to come along
and tell it plain and simple.

In the dying there is living
or put another way,
where one story ends
another’s just beginning
the end of which
will be another story
born of dying and living
a relentless parade of hope
which in the end
and in the beginning and in between
makes the book
and the dying inside and outright
good.