Somewhere between December and February

Ice enters your heart in those cold lands

And never goes away again. Iron in the soul.

You feel the sinking of despair deep in the gut

That which the Globe reports on its crime page

And hungry homeless men muttering on pavements

Graffiti on the walls of subway stations

And funeral parlours not far from cemeteries.

The chill that will not let a grown plump woman

Forgive her mother just recently dead

After a ritual mourning when the will

Is read out and siblings are torn apart:

You know it in your bones. Evil is in you.

Who would want to live there and who to die

Who could wait for the ephemeral Spring?

Who should move to the South yet not escape it?

The child psychiatrist divorcing at eighty

The dog abandoned and the one home sold.

So stark the truth you long for sunny tropics

Lush with emotion and flora and fauna

Where people weep buckets in movie halls.

It’s quite enough to turn you a believer.

So much for Nietzsche.